I am a Freelance Graphic Designer with 30+ years of experience specialized in presentation design and onsite live event work. My home office is in Sterling, MA and I travel locally, nationwide, and internationally to work as a graphics op and speaker support on corporate events.
I went to Fitchburg State College and majored in Communications/Media, specialized in Graphic Design. My senior year internship was at Cornerstone Associates / Clearlight in the Fall of 1989, helping the art department to make slides on the Autographix workstation, running the AutoClick imaging system to shoot slides, and transcribing audio files using the Mac IIc. I still work with the people that I met there.
Cornerstone was a film lab, multi-image event producer. They also owned Clearlight which made dissolve units that controlled multiple slide projectors.
My senior project was a multi-image show explaining Cornerstone’s business and my role there. I wrote the script, created slides, and used some Cornerstone portfolio slides to illustrate the business. I recorded the soundtrack and, with help from the on-staff multi-image techs, placed the cues in to the cassette tape that would run the 3 projector show.
After graduation, I was hired by Cornerstone Associates and started making slides and multi-image presentations on the Autographix workstation. Autographix was an MS-DOS based slide graphics workstation for output to film. Each slide was an individual file, and there was a tablet instead of a mouse. If a company logo was needed for the slides, it had to be traced on the tablet by plotting points and bending the line by typing in the angle. To get a photo onto the slide with computer generated type involved putting mask boxes next to the bullets, white on black and black on white slides. The photo was sized in to the mask on the Forox camera and shot again to make the final slide. It was a long process that used a roll of film to make a few slides! I also ran the camera that shot the slide files, which involved MS-DOS commands to shoot the files from floppies. All of the slides were then divided among multiple slide projectors and cued in the soundtrack to project movement. The final product looked quite impressive.
My next job was for Autographix, the graphics workstation manufacturer, as a help desk customer service associate. I answered client help desk calls and taught software classes after a major revision to the software. It was still DOS based and one slide per file, but it had photoshop type capabilities and the artist could make computer generated backgrounds and gradients! A big leap forward! This was a temporary position and towards the end of my contract there changes in the industry were starting to happen and the slide business was becoming obsolete.
I went back to Cornerstone where Harvard Graphics and Aldus Persuasion were starting to take over from slide making. Harvard Graphics was the precursor to PowerPoint. Harvard University would bring their files to Cornerstone for imaging, and I learned the software from having to edit and make sure their palettes were applied correctly. It was still imaged on to slides at that point in 1992 because there weren’t any transitions in the software.
I moved on to freelancing in 1993 at Banyan Networks in Westborough, MA and local Boston production companies JMP (Jack Morton) and Envision, among others. Apple desktops were now being used for presentation creation and I bought my first computer, an Apple Centris 650 with a 14 inch monitor for $4000. Aldus Persuasion was the professional’s choice for slide layout. It could export .pict files, which could be brought into Macromedia Director and cut up to animate the graphics. Another long process and not easy to edit since none of the type is live. Photoshop was Mac only in this era and didn’t have layers. Everything had to be saved in channels and as separate files. External hard drives were expensive so some things weren’t backed up. Computers had tiny hard drives too. I look back at this era and I’m amazed we were able to produce some of the shows without it all crashing and burning. There wasn’t email or internet so working from hand drawn storyboards that arrived via fax was the height of technology. When the first zip drive came out it was a revelation! I bought that first model with some 100 megabyte zip disks. The drive was small and light, but the transformer brick power plug that came with it weighed about 10 pounds.
Aldus was bought by Adobe and eventually they stopped updating it, as PowerPoint was taking over. In the late 90s when Microsoft Win 95 added an onscreen font smoother and animations, which included a professional looking smooth dissolve option, PowerPoint won. Most clients used MS Office on a PC so the presentation industry followed. PowerPoint on a Mac did not have anywhere near the amount of capabilities that the PC version had, so I started using mainly PCs once Adobe released a PC version of Photoshop. There were still a few holdouts using Macs with PPT and Director, but that labor intensive work went away as clients got used to editing right up until they went onstage.
Today, I still make templates, graphics, and presentations from scripts/storyboards for a few shows, but more of my work is onsite GFX op. Most of my clients make their own PPT and I edit or add to it on site. I’ve made Awards looks on site and PPT notes files to match one to one with slides for some of the bigger shows, or just use the presenter view PPT and output 3 screens.
