Do conditions today give the ambitious young designer and printer the same opportunities I enjoyed back in the late Victorian period? Not the same, of course, but even greater.

While it is true that the Nineties were literally made to order for a boy who had acquired only such training as was to be had in the sparsely equipped print-ship of a weekly newspaper in a pioneer iron-mining town, today is made to order for the ambitious young designer and printer who is availing himself of the training to be had by even the small-town beginner.

Back in my boyhood days a study of such examples of design and printing as now reach even the most remote out-posts of the printing industry, would have taught me more than I learned during a year in the art department, so-called, of the publishing house of Rand McNally in Chicago.

The inspiration to be derived from the text and advertising pages of our standard magazines, together with the creative art of school children and the art magazines, quite unknown at the turn of the century, supplies a liberal education teaching the beginner how to appreciate and use the printing and designing advantages of today.

What are these advantages, and why do they open a door to exceptional opportunities not known in the Nineties? First, and perhaps of greatest importance, is the typographic consciousness now prevalent, especially in the advertising and business world, where it is universally recognized that effective typography and design increase sales.

Another advantage is to be found in the significant mechanical advances of the last few years, the significance of the growing importance of offset printing, presenting so many opportunities yet to be grasped by the designer. And, an infant industry now, but one of vast possibilities, is commercial silk-screen printing.

But upon my return to New York after many years in California I think my greatest thrill came when I witnessed the mechanical setting of type by photography. Always I have liked the feel of putting type into the stick, and I liked to see the composition growing on the galley. In all my years of working with type I have never made a preparatory lay-out, except when the composition had to be done by another, which happened only on magazine headings after a style had been determined in advance.

But this is an age of lay-outs, and in this new photographic process with the use of photographic enlargements, there are possibilities for display composition of any required size, and great variety, presenting intriguing possibilities for the creative designer and typographer.

All such steadily growing advances present opportunities which were nonexistent back in my own youthful days. Together with the superior training enjoyed by the youth of today, they have changed conditions into a new world fraught with wonderful opportunities far beyond any I knew in the Nineties.

w b

Short Hills, New Jersey
May, 1954