A lot of the supplies you’ve mentioned are used by fine artists, as well as by graphic artists who draw on paper before scanning their work and continuing to modify it on the computer.
I remember taking drafting for 5 years in school and having to learn to do all those lines and lettering perfect. What a waste of practice time. None of my schooling taught me to use a cad system.
I have a source for a large amount of Letraset, not in quantity but in variety. There must be 400 fonts(correct usage? too young to know better) available. I use it to label random things, like coffee cups.
I’m guessing this is a genuine brand name or descriptive term, but the names ‘Bitchy Blue’, ‘Weepy White’, and ‘Moody Maroon’ popped into my head and aren’t going to leave.
How about the complex little template you could use to trace arbitrary curves and a variety of angles onto paper? I’m guessing CAD software and Photoshop have both eaten into that thing’s utility.
Does anyone still use #3 pencils? I heard once that draftsmen were the main market for them and now draftsmen seem to use drafting software. (They have harder graphite than #2 and, therefore, make lighter marks, which is why you can’t use them on standardized tests. The results of doing so anyway are unpredictable.)
I made my very first letterhead with some cast-off monarch stationery and leftover Helvetica presstype. When I showed it to the art director he said “that’s pretty good But your spacing is a little irregular.”
I can’t say it any better than matt_mcl. The art store I worked at for a long time used to make boatloads of money on graphic design supplies, but it survived the digital revolution by not clinging to the old way and focusing on selling art supplies.
Boy, do I remember these things. I worked in newspapers for years after graduating from college. The proportion wheel and pica pole were my tools of the trade.
I reached for some sticky tape the other day and it turned out to be a roll of register marks. Instantly, the scent of a bromide machine seemed to appear in my nostrils. And we don’t even have a cat.
That’s it. I miss my lost youth, but I don’t miss clogged rapidographs, one-point line tape (with or without carrier), or calculating how many column inches copy will fill at 1.29 characters per pica.
I used to have a Rotring set. In fact, I probably still do, somewhere. But I just use a regular fibretip pen and scan, or do everything on the PC, and fine ink pens are no longer a tool in my arsenal.
We weren’t allowed to use those until 10th grade… the previous 4 years of Draftsmanship were strictly tiralíneas (m-w doesn’t know what it’s called in English, that tool where you had to take up some ink from a China ink bottle and use a little wheel to regulate thickness). We were dying to get the Rotrings. Mind you, thanks to that I can do better inks with a Bic than some folks with any fancy tools you care to name.
I’ve never seen a blueprint in, you know, blueprint paper, though. I had a total OooOOO moment when I found out why “blueprints” are called “blueprints” in English (in Spanish they’re planos, “flat (drawings)”).