For a significant chunk of my working life I was a graphic designer, or graphic artist, or whatever suited at the time. I worked in a small design studio literally tacked on to the side of a litho printers.

When I started, desktop publishing was still in its earliest stages. My job entailed taking physical artwork and pasting it onto boards. From there it would go to the “darkroom”, where a skilled operative would make a film negative of it, then by secret and arcane methods on to a sheet of aluminium which would be fitted to the big printing machines and made into printed materials. By the time I left, most of the arcane stuff had transferred down the line to the studio. We were pushing vectors and pixels about, outputting paginated film directly ready for the platemaker, and the new technology of creating printing plates directly from the designer’s computer was just beginning.