After the freak
arrival of personal computers in 1988 I dug my heels in and told everyone that
I wanted nothing whatsoever to do with them. Mel Hurtig had wanted me to
reprise my 1985 TCE feat but on a computer this time. I went to one trade show
where I was informed that I couldn’t possibly produce as many pages a day
(approximately 70) using a computer. A few other pitfalls presented themselves
and I regretfully told Mel that I couldn’t do it. (As punishment he didn’t let
me design his junior encyclopedia at decade’s end … after that he sold his
company to McClelland & Stewart and I never worked with Mel again … except
to help him with his ill-fated National Party of Canada run at Federal
governance in 1993.) A 2000+ page illustrated encyclopedia was hardly the thing
to cut one’s digital baby teeth on.
Thing
was that I loathed most of the computerized design that I’d seen and I could
see that it was going to spell the doom of typesetters in short order. (To this
day Mono Lino Typesetting sits like a ghost on Dupont Street … and to think
that we all saw it as an ideal place to work when our OCA class toured there in
the late 60s.) I was informed by several production managers that they wouldn’t
be able to use me as a designer unless I jumped aboard the bandwagon and got
myself outfitted with an electronic studio. No thank you!
So
what did I do with myself? I continued to work as an illustrator … initially I
was represented by Three in a Box but that proved to be too many artists with
too few choice jobs to go around. I developed a new style … something I called
El Whacko© … which I first utilized in a book called It Takes Two Judges to Try a Cow. The main purpose of this new
style was to slow me down and make me more mindful of my artwork. I revived
cross hatching and stippling … things I’d given up on as I had tried to speed
myself up. One advantage was that the artwork didn’t have to be done in a
single sitting anymore.
Severed
ties with Three in a Box once they wanted a cut of work that I’d generated
myself (e.g. Red Deer College Press’s Money
Midas). Not to mention that they could never reconcile my wanting to do
original promotion pieces rather than just recycling old work like most of the
other artists did. Continued for rest of 90s without a sales rep and handled my
own self promotion with varying degrees of success and failure. My income was mostly
just a fraction of what it had once been. But I wasn’t about to give up.
In
1996 I had two concurrent book projects … pet astrology guides … one for cats
and another for dogs. These helped me get through several bad patches in that
year even if they didn’t bring in very much income.
By
1999 I decided that maybe I’d made a mistake not buying into computerized
design. So I bought a computer, a scanner, a couple of printers and got some
useful programs and set about figuring out how to actually design books from
scratch again. By 2000 I was back in the business of book design … just in time
to find out that much of the book design had migrated to Third World countries
where they worked for a fraction of our minimum wage. I got another sales rep
but the business didn’t seem to be there.
And
so the wilderness continues….
