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Comics: The Dying Craft Of Lettering

I no longer mind being called a Luddite. It might’ve bothered me once. Now, it’s become a lazy catchall slur meant to target anyone who has any kind of reservation about technological ‘progress’—because, after all, progress is an unalloyed good which everyone must believe in like obedient cult members.

I was all for digital tech and online stuff back in the day. And by that, I mean 15+ years ago. Maybe you have to be immersed in something for a while to start seeing the dangers properly. Digital has an insidious tendency to slowly, creepingly replace everything it touches with a digital facsimile. Often as not, the craft or physical actuality it replaces gets killed off completely… or, in cases like, for instance, film being made on film, a few stubborn holdouts will keep the organic original alive (Tarantino, Nolan, etc).
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Okay, So What Do I Do?

Speaking of all this design stuff… actually, I do have a serious problem. A problem that would make it hard for me to even do a new logo for this site, for instance.

The logo at the top of the page (at the time of writing!) was done in Photoshop 4.0 on my old computer. It was nothing fancy; two gradient fills stitched together, Black Chancery font stretched vertically a little bit, standard emboss filter. That’s as fancy as my logos get, anyway.

Then: new computer, not running Win98 but WinXP. It doesn’t like Photoshop 4.0. It hangs/exits very frequently on load and save of images. I’m sure this is due to the age of the software. So now I’m stuck with a thing called PhotoStudio (I think it came with my old scanner), which works fine but is frankly crap!
Read More »Okay, So What Do I Do?