Packing up 34 years’ worth of work is not only daunting, it is therapeutic. It has given me a chance to purge the things that I do not want, to look at the hundreds of samples we have that no longer need to be kept, and to revisit the many technological changes that have taken place. As I throw out old Rubylith, ruling pens, spray mount booths, photo disks, and roll-a-binding machines, I can reflect on how far we have come and how much has changed.
Going through client samples over the last three decades has been a fascinating review of where technology has come, and what part we played in the Northern Virginia tech scene. Many of these companies are long gone—having merged or been acquired—but we served a who’s who list of clients that included MICOM, IBM, DEC, Oracle, VM Software, UNIX Systems, STSC, Systems Center, Software AG, Intel, Infinite, Cable and Wireless, and MCI, to name just a very few.
Grafik’s Far Side postcard design for System Center’s UNIX network services.
A page from The DBA’s Dictionary, which Grafik designed for Systems Center.
And we promoted clients who were dealing with these “new technologies”:
- WAN to LAN communication—33 years ago
- VM and UNIX operating systems—32 years ago
- Enterprise software that could connect a mainframe to a PC—30 years ago
- Satellite communication—27 years ago
- Interoperability—26 years ago
- Digitized imagery—25 years ago
- Cloud computing—15 years ago
- Geo-spatial location—15 years ago
- Digital asset management systems—15 years ago
- The first PCs—14 years ago
- Content management systems—10 years ago
All of these terms seem pretty familiar now, but they were unknown when we started to work with them. It has always been our job to translate difficult concepts into understandable language and we have been good translators. Looking at all our samples, I am reminded of the golden age of photography and illustration—before stock—when our photographers and illustrators worked hand in hand with our design teams. And our designs did their jobs. Along with the many wonderful copywriters that we worked with that could make something boring seem alive. I remember one client where we created a series of three puzzle posters that became collectors’ items for UNIX programmers and made our tiny client look much bigger than it was. Or the series of Far Side cartoons we commissioned for another systems integrator. My trip down memory lane took me from a time where a technology company was represented by a pixelated image—or anything in silver and black—printed on very glossy paper, to the present time where nothing is printed on any kind of paper!
Grafik’s Far Side postcard design for System Center’s distributed printer tools.
For almost 35 years I have led teams that have had to wrestle with hard-to-understand technologies, sometimes wishing that we had clients that made socks instead of “fourth generational languages.” But at the end of the day, if you can sell technology well, you can sell anything, which is what we have done and continue to do. So for now, I am still content to wonder what interesting path the next tech client will take us down.
Grafik’s software packaging design for eMotion MediaPartner.
