(10) letraset sheets

I went to college in the dark ages (i.e., the days before laser and inkjet printers), and it's so easy now to open up your word processor and pick a font and make your sign, centered or otherwise placed with a click of your mouse, and not think twice about doing any of it, but in the dark ages, it was all about the Letraset, pages of dry-transfer letters, and it was very painstaking work, laying everything out and caaarefully transferring the letters so that they didn't peel or break up, exactly in the right positions.

It was a tough gig. I remember this one assignment I did for an art history class, a kind of Choose Your Own Art Theory interactive project that involved a hundred words in a hundred different fonts on a hundred sheets of paper, and I could do this project in an hour and a half tonight, do it while watching last night's episode of Glee and still have time to clean out the litterbox and take out the trash when I was done, but twenty years ago it took three allnighters in a row to scrub all those letters off onto the pages.

(Also, it was kinda expensive, but such is the life of a design student, so we shan't consider that.)

And okay, it was exponentially more difficult than playdates with Photoshop, but it was so very satisfying, guaranteed to make my meticulous, crabbed little soul sing.