From the Ashes of History
wALT Five, Design: Sean Adams and Peter Grant, 1984
I found this issue while cleaning the bookcase. wALT was the student publication at CalArts in the 1980s. It included contributions from students in all majors including essays, poetry, and visual arts. Peter Grant and I designed this issue using the Macintosh 128K that Apple recently sent to the department. It was the one that required a floppy disk to run and had limited software such as MacPaint and MacWrite. There was no scanner. Apple included a set of typefaces named after cities, such as Monaco, Geneva, Chicago, and San Francisco. The typeface New York was the stand-in for Times Roman (but I called it Times Roman because I could).
To produce the publication, we set the Times Roman on the Mac and printed out “galleys” on the low resolution image-writer (no Laser-writer yet). We set the headlines in Gill Sans, a typeface on the Mergenthaler VIP typesetting machine. The whole thing was pasted-up as mechanicals and sent to the printer (see video below). We didn’t realize it at the time, but this was a first step toward digital design production. It was a wacky hybrid that required endless typing and rubber cement. But it was fun.
