THIS week is the 20th anniversary of the opening of Eurotunnel that links Britain to the continent. Coincidentally, during an infrequent but overdue tidy up in the office, some artwork was unearthed dating back to October 1987, the very month when your correspondent, a graphics editor, joined the paper. Our most recent member of staff was not even born when it was published.
In many ways we would be happy for the item to appear in our pages today. Good information design always passes the test of time. Yet what is most interesting is how the process has radically changed.
In 1987 the artwork was inked onto paper with a Rotring pen (a highly precise pen with a “stylographic” point—a fine steel tubed nib, not a rollerball). The image would have been sketched first in pencil. To achieve this, some details might have been enlarged or reduced by projecting the image onto tracing paper with a big industrial camera, and then tracing the artwork using carbon paper.
My memory tells me that the rule was that everything was to be approved at the pencil stage because changes after ink hit the paper was the cause of much angst and long nights. My memory further tells me that approval at the pencil stage was rare.
Especially tricky were the double lines to depict roads, such as those that appear in the map above. A special adjustable pen to do this was a nightmare to use. Hold the pen at a slightly wrong angle and the ink would inevitably run out before the road ended. Overfill the pen and all you achieved was a big black puddle on the paper. Pecked or dashed lines were drawn full and then scratched away with a scalpel against a template held along the line, for uniformity. In the map above, dashed lines depict the land portion of the tunnel in Britain and France.
The text on the artwork was produced with Letraset—plastic sheets with long rows of letters that were affixed by rubbing each letter off. These were available in different fonts and sizes. (There are eight different fonts alone in the map above, from bold to italics to all uppercase lettering.) Producing each map and chart letter by letter took time. The completed words were cut out with a scalpel and carefully placed in position. And though Letraset gave more vowels than consonants on each sheet, we always ran out of As; we drew a lot of maps and country names are full of them.
As for tinted areas in the artwork (such as the areas of chalk and clay in the diagram above), they were a combination of adhesive-backed sheets of pre-printed dots and lines, and a plastic mask on film (the blue areas on the artwork). They would have the appropriate screen added at the printers, producing a nicer final image. All were cut out with a scalpel and carefully placed down. And as we used a two-colour printing process, we also had film layers with the red linework drawn on. Yet even then it was more complicated than it sounds: it was drawn in black ink and then added to the red printing plate.
To enhance quality, the artwork was drawn at double size and then photographed with an industrial camera and scaled to its final size on paper. The photographic paper version of the completed artwork would then be literally pasted onto the layout—only to be re-shot by the camera as a complete, printable page. (The full article with these images in their published form is here.)
What about computers? In 1987 we had an early Apple Mac sitting in the corner of the office. We experimented with MacDraw, but we could not get comparable quality with the early bitmap editor. Initially we used it to create the text and printed this onto adhesive-backed paper. Some of the type on both the examples shown here were done in this way.
It was not until Illustrator 88 was released a year later by Adobe Software that things like “postscript font typography” and “vector graphics” meant we could start to move away from the hand-drawn era. Today our production is almost entirely digital. Adobe Illustrator is still our preferred software. Unlike in days of yore, we can make edits right up until the final minute of production.
But for all the advantages in ease, speed and flexibility that our modern tools provide, one aspect still holds true. To achieve a successful infographic, it is better to have a clear idea of how it will look at the end before one starts the hard work. Today's faster processes mean it is more important than ever to take time for planning and aesthetic considerations at the very outset. Perhaps not with the same degree of preparation as building a tunnel under the sea, but with much care nonetheless.
