User:Bill Shattuck/sandbox

This is the sandbox of Bill Shattuck...

I spent 15 years in the printing industry before I was replaced by a computer: I started out as a proofreader at a weekly newspaper called the Westmount Examiner in Montreal, Quebec. After a year, I left to do a 3 year apprenticeship for a Montreal printing company. It was there that I learned all the inner workings of the offset printing industry. From layout, pasteup, Letraset, shooting film with a horizontal Robertson camera, developing film, opaquing film pinholes, stripping/masking film and finally making plates. I never learned to run an offset press, which I regret, because when the industry became involved with desktop and direct to press imaging, I got involved in sales instead of being a pressman. Even though I was still involved with the graphic arts industry, selling display ad space and then colour separations for a film company which also went the way of the dinosaur, I have always missed the hands-on tactile experience of the job...as well as the smell of the pressroom.