Drop the Shadows
| May 02, 2008

Ahh Photoshop. The most universal and mis-used of design programs. How can one program produce the most garish of hack effects but also produce the most subtle sublime work around.

I was first introduced to Photoshop via a display copy at CompUSA in Framingham circa 91 or 92. An earnest English major - I was working long hours at my school newspaper: x-acto blading line tape and ruining my clothes with melted wax as I tried to paste up newspaper columns from our bw letter size printer.

Having been an early adopter of MacPaint I was eager to learn Photosshop - which, at the time, did not even support layers. At my first internship at The Boston Phoenix making 2"x2" phone sex ads where I tried to emulate Paula Scher's typography of her Shakespeare Festival posters - to the chargrin of the harried classified ad manager, I would try to sneak little Photoshop produced backgrounds into ads.  Cracked was the grunge font of choce amongst the 20-somethings that worked there. 1 in 3 ads used it someplace that summer it seemed,

Through the years as I have grown to appreciate the precision and speed of Illustrator - my firrst geek love will always be with Photoshop, the little program that spawned a communications revolution.

Tags:  love" "college, newspapers", photoshop "geek

Topic: Educational Design