![]() No.” But Aldus said, “How soon do you need it?” So, we announced to the newspaper world that AP would be switching to Freehand, and that we could get if for them at a discount. Adobe said, “That’s against our religion. We asked both Adobe and Aldus if they could build into their next version the ability to open and edit vector-based images. Eventually, though, we had to make the move. Also, postscript programs couldn’t read vector images, so entire databases of maps and images would be useless. Superior postscript drawing programs like Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand had come out, but for the Associated Press to switch to one of those meant getting all of our news members to purchase and learn it, and most of the smaller papers resisted this expense of time and money. with AP’s Brian Horton to cover the 1988 elections.ġ989 MacDraw graphic, one of my last with that software. The equipment in this illustration was drawn directly in the Mac SE using MacDraw II, but the people, which my wife posed for, were drawn using the method detailed above.Ĭovering elections with the Mac meant sending graphics directly to papers through Mac-to-Mac- dial-up instead of over a slow, bogged down photo network. Trace the image with the mouse (much like drawing with a bar of soap) by clicking around the acetate drawing without moving your head (otherwise, your drawing would be distorted).Tape the acetate to the Mac over the screen.Trace the drawing (or photo reference) with a marker pen onto clear acetate.Size the drawing (or photo reference) on a copy machine to about the size of the tiny Mac screen.We would sketch out our drawings on paper, and in order to get them into the Mac to finalize them, we followed this process: Because we were a news agency that supplied graphics to 2,000+ frugal news organizations, we had to stick with MacDraw much longer than we had wanted. We used the vector-based MacDraw program, which was easy, cheap, and already in every newsroom. In the early days, before scanners came along, drawing on Macs was heavy going. Hours were saved in the making of the graphic, which made our subscribers very happy. The diagram I made that night, explaining the process workers were using to build the doomed building (called “lift-slab construction”), was transmitted over a phone modem directly from the Post to AP in New York, who then routed it to hundreds of newspapers and TV stations around the country. The Connecticut Post was nice enough to give me a desk to work on (thanks Rick Sayers!), and my Mac was the first one they had seen in action. It was then I realized that I could go with him! No longer tied down to a drawing table, I threw my Macintosh into a cardboard box, and hopped in the car with him. There was a terrible accident where a building under construction collapsed killing a number of workmen in Bridgeport, Connecticut, which was about 35 miles from the AP offices in New York, As was the usual drill, I found myself explaining to a photographer, who was rushing to the scene, which photos I needed him to take for me as possible reference for a diagram. ![]() Apple was excited that the news industry was interested in their products, and if UPI used their equipment, our 1,600 newspaper and TV clients would also have to use it to edit our graphics, if only to delete the byline!īefore Apple’s swanky backpack existed, I used a cardboard box. Her icons for the operating system are shown below. ![]() Apple flew executives out to help us set them up, including Apple iconographer and designer Susan Kare ( ). ![]() We purchased two Apple Lisa computers which could generate simple maps and charts. In 1985, I was working for the news agency, UPI, in Washington, D.C., which sold infographics to newspaper clients. But by the mid ‘80s, there was a bright light on the horizon: Apple was making computers that could plot a graph with the click of a mouse. My fingers were black with ink and nicked by X-Acto blades. Grrrr… As a news artist working in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I hated plotting graphs by hand, like the ones below, (my boss wanted me to make charts like “Nigel Holmes in Time!”), and I made a lot of them. (Above: State-of-the-art in 1985, the Apple Lisa. COMPUTER INFOGRAPHICS ARRIVE ON THE SCENE.Ī guest post by a digital news graphics pioneer, Karl Gude, who is now a professor in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University. ![]()
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