Did you ever want to be a graphic designer? I always wanted to be a graphics designer. Ever since I got my first computer and I got this little draw program with it. Oh, hi.
Welcome to the Daily Grateful. I'm going to talk about how grateful I am that I am still maybe not old enough to where I can actually or maybe I'm not too damn old, to where I can actually learn how to do one of the easy graphic design programs that are out there. Believe it or not, even or not. I used to work for an underground newspaper in the 60s, in the late 60s, 1969, to be exact.
All the Aquarian, it was published out of Tampa, Florida by a bunch of hippies, bunch of damn hippies, cool people, except for the guy that owned it. He wasn't a hippie. As it turns out, as it turns out, he was a bit of a, do I want to say this on my family, friendly podcast? Okay.
He went on to years later, he went on to open up one of those establishments that cater to people in the lifestyle, if you know, you know. But the rest of it, we're all really cool hippies. I worked there with a girl that came from a very wealthy family and she now goes by the name of Willow. She was a hippie, went to the Atlanta Pop Festival with her, hung out with her there.
You know, just all kinds of stuff. And what we used to do at that underground newspaper was put out a issue every week. But you see, in those days, there were no computers. There were absolutely no computers.
So you had to get this thing camera ready. Printers in those days said, we need camera ready copy. Otherwise, we have to charge you for graphic design and graphic design is very expensive. So we taught ourselves how to produce a weekly newspaper and make it look decent, you know, headlines and pictures and everything.
Now the one thing we had to do is we had to get a typewriter with a carbon ribbon. And that is very important because it's print ready. I just hit my microphone with my finger. Did you hear that?
Anyway, and for headlines, we would use this product called press type, which was a wax paper that had all these different fonts on it. And you just put it down on the paper and you took a quarter and you scratched it out and it would wind up on the paper. And we used graph paper that was light blue that would not photograph and we would put it on there so it was all very straight. And we just did all the graphic design ourselves the old fashioned way.
And I got to tell you, it would take us, we would have the paper written by Wednesday. The paper was the paper closed on Wednesday and then we went to press on Friday. And it was all hands on deck on Wednesday evening to start getting this thing laid out and getting it done and getting it typed and getting it everything about it absolutely correct. So we could take it to the printer and we had to put the ad, we had to design the ads.
People buy ads from us, we would have to design the ads using, you know, anything we could to design an ad. The press type and we had pictures, we bought clip art pictures that we could just cut out with a pair of scissors and glue on there. I mean, that's how weird it was. Okay.
But that's how we did it. Now, the computer age is here and graphic design is easy. Now if you have Photoshop and you know how to use it, then you can do graphic design. I don't have Photoshop.
I used to have it. And I never learned how to use it because the learning curve is very high. So they've come out with some newer ones now that are a lot easy, a lot more easy. Canva, if you've ever been to Canva, I have designed things on Canva.
By the way, I am so bad that Canva, I'm such a bad graphic designer that Canva has asked me not to come back. I'm only kidding, they haven't done that. But I mean, what I've designed on there is purely pathetic. My business card for the podcast, I designed on Canva.
Do I have one around here? I don't. But I designed that with Canva. Now there's another thing called Vista Create that a friend of mine uses.
And she swears by it. And she is not computer friendly, but she comes up with all kinds of stuff. She's made invitations to her grandkids parties. She's done all kinds of stuff with it.
Then there's Adobe Express. It was formerly called Spark. And what it does is it simplifies everything from Photoshop, makes it very easy. Now I haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to.
I'm looking forward to trying it as a matter of fact, absolutely looking forward to trying it. Other than that, you then you start getting into things like GIMP. GIMP is a Photoshop, a free version of Photoshop. It's not.
It's not made by the same people. But it is just as difficult to use. And then there's Inkscape, which is a free and open source vector graphics editor. And yeah, just the name itself makes me nervous.
I want things that are simple. I remember when years ago in the 80s, there was a company that was called Desktop Publishing of Tarpon Springs. And you could go there with your ideas. All you had to do was walk in with your ideas and they would sit you down in front of an old Macintosh computer.
And when I say this was a little square ones, but they had larger screens for it off to the side. And they had some type of very easy to use publisher program that they would spend 10 minutes walking you through so you knew how to do it. And I use that program to design ads for our bug company and our lawn company. And I used it to design labels.
I used it for everything. You paid them $10 an hour, which was a lot of money back then, but it was worth it. And I would go and I would spend $30 in a night, which was a lot of money to spend in the night. Okay.
And not take a girl on a date. No, that was just me in front of their ancient Macintosh computers. So I'm thankful that there are programs out there. I'm looking forward to spending some time with Vista Create and learning how to do things like that.
I'm very grateful for Adobe Express. I have a friend who's cranking stuff out with it. Canva? Everybody uses Canva.
Why can't I? It's like the over the rainbow song. The birds can create graphic design with Canva. Then why?
Why? Can't I? We'll see you tomorrow.