These are the good old days

Hey! I actually read a Design Observer article all the way to the end! From Our Little Secret by Michael Bierut (whose name, is it just me?, always grates on my brain as a typo):

As a young designer in his first real job in 1980, I learned that this made typography a high-stakes game. It went like this. You’d get a manuscript from a client, say 20 pages of Courier (although no one called it Courier, or even thought of it that way). You’d have to calculate how many characters were in the manuscript the old fashioned way—no Microsoft Word, no word count tools—by counting characters per line, then total number of lines, then doing the math. Next you’d have to decide out what text typeface you wanted to use, what size and what measure. Finally, you’d refer to a copyfitting table to see how long the columns would run: more math. If it seemed like this figure would fit the layout, you’d mark up the manuscript and send it to a typesetter. It would be back, set in beautiful type the following morning, galley after crisp, clean galley of it. If it fit, good for you. If it ran long, guess what? You just lost $250, stupid.

. . . It was a system that rewarded deliberate planning, not creative experimentation. You found yourself repeatedly specifying certain fonts just because you knew how they would set: after a few years I could make a pretty accurate guess about how long a typewritten manuscript would run in Garamond #3 (12 on 13, flush left, ragged right on a 30 pica column measure) just by looking at it. So I set a lot of Garamond #3.

So, here’s my flippant comment: Not much has changed for those publishers that still send their books out to to be typeset. At the job I just left, this is still how they do castoff, this is still how most of the designers choose body type and estimate length, and this is probably still how the typesetter bills. (I don’t know how much they charged us to rerun a book that didn’t make castoff on the first try, but I’m sure it wasn’t free. I’d guess that it cost less than $250, but only because if it had cost that much, I’m sure someone would have scolded me at some point—I had a lot of do-overs for a stretch, there.)

Anybody seen Helvetica or going to see it tonight? (Me, I’m waiting for it to come to Netflix, as I do with every movie.) If so, please report on how many people in attendance were wearing appropriately typographic garments.