Aldus Prepress Group

While searching through a box of my son’s Legos for people to use as part of an art project, I came across this pin. I must have picked it up at a trade show, very likely On-Demand in Philadelphia in the early 90’s. I would brought back bags of nifty free give-aways for my wife and son — usually pens, highlighters, mousepads, and such from my visits with the vendors there. We used the the Aldus products PressWise and TrapWise for many years at work. Finding this pin brought back fond memories of the early days of Penn State Printing Services.

“The Aldus Prepress Group was started by Ranjit Mulgaonkar and Michael Reiher in 1990. Under the leadership of Ranjit Mulgaonkar in three years time the group built the industries first desktop prepress software to perform operations such as color separation, imposition, trapping and automated work-flow. The Aldus Prepress products were used by trade shops and service bureaus around the world. These products were also OEMed by print industry Giants like DuPont (1993) and Agfa (1993). After the Adobe acquisition/merger of Aldus Corporation, the product-line was acquired by Luminous Corporation on January 12, 1996.”

Watch videos of their products here.

1962: Proposed Interrobangs

via welovetypography
“…Frustrated with the growing tendency of copywriters to combine the exclamation mark and question mark to yield a surprised or rhetorical question — “Who would punctuate a sentence like that?!” — [Martin K. Speckter] penned an article for Type Talks to offer a solution. ‘Making a new point, or, how about that…’ appeared in the March-April 1962 issue and argued that there was a need for a single punctuation mark to replace this ugly, jury-rigged construction. As the article went on to explain, this putative symbol was intended to convey a particular mixture of surprise and doubt…”

Read the rest here.

360º Panorama is the largest indoor photo in the world

via letterology

“Read a fascinating story from Wired about a 360 degree photograph of Prague’s Philosophical Hall, a Baroque reading room in the city’s 868-year-old Strahov Monastery Library. And then view the 40 gigapixel photo produced by photographer Jeffrey Martin here. This room is a repository of rare books and is typically off limits to the public. Martin received special permission to spend the five days of shooting it took to make the composite image. The camera took another 111 hours of post-processing in order to stitch together the nearly 3000 images of the final 360 degree photo. You can actually scan the entire room of the finished photograph and zoom in close enough to read some of the titles on the rare books.”