After qualifying from Cardiff Art College in 1979, I worked in various advertising agencies — think Mad Men without the drinking and the womanising! I eventually set up my own design studio in 1992 in Bridgend, South Wales and since then have had the pleasure of helping all sorts of organisations advance their businesses by supplying them with well designed high quality effective promotional material and websites. When we started the firm in the depth of the financial recession of 1992 we were still using Letraset dry transfer lettering, bromides and hot wax. Visuals were produced with magic markers and repro-houses were needed to make final films and chromalins before the printing process could even begin. Today all those expensive processes have been replaced with digital technology (originally in 1992 with a second hand Macintosh IIci and now today running a suite of several powerful computers including a Mac Pro, and a new 27 inch iMac with 32 GB of memory. These are all linked to the Adobe Creative Cloud giving us access to the latest Adobe applications and the entire Typekit font library. This means that for the end user the cost of full colour printing has plummeted. The glossy colour brochures that were once only affordable by large corporations are now well within the reach of the smallest start-up firm. And digital printing presses now mean even short runs of 20 to 50 impressions are easily affordable.
