Seeing the type set Masthead below reminds me of when I set type like that, for making signs by Lineoscribe, over at the Erdahl-Cloyd College Union (now part of D H Hill Library), working as a campus graphic designer to pay my way thru the School of Design, as it was called back then. When I joined the faculty after graduating in Product Design in 1966, my office mate Fred Eichenberger and I set up what Dean Henry Kamphoefner allowed us to call the Visual Design Option in Product Design (after considerable struggle convincing Henry that Visual Design really should be allowed to join his rigid definition of what the School was about). Sometime during the two years I taught there, I made wall signs for several offices in the old building, which was the original D H Hill Library, built in 1925 if I remember correctly.
As a student, in Descriptive Drawing courses we had to make a large measured drawing of the front elevation of what was then called Brooks Hall, maybe still is. They took a long time and a lot of work to do. A classmate in another section taught by George Bireline had his laid out for review, and George, always with a cup of coffee in his hand, somehow managed to spill some onto my friend’s completed illustration board drawing. Painter George, never nonplussed, picked up a brush, poured on more coffee, and applied a light tan wash. My friend — I’m blocking on his name — got an A on his project.
For the wall signs, I set type, letter by letter, on paper with pressure transfer Lettraset, took them downtown to an engraver who still made plates for letterpress, had him photographically reverse it out so that the letters were acid etched into the plate, not raised. Then I rubbed black paint down into recessed words on the matt zinc plates, got Champ in the shop to help me make some boards to raise them in relief off the wall, screwed the boards to the walls outside the appropriate offices, and contact cemented the plates on, after sealing them with multi coats of clear spray acrylic. We made do with what was available in those pre-digital days of metal and chemistry.
Wonder if any of those signs are still around? ~ Gene
