This comic comes right out of my past. For a time I worked both as an artist at a T-shirt printer and doing art for an Ad Specialties place. When taking orders for shirts or stuff the customer would always claim they had camera-ready art. Then when they’d come in to deliver it (most image stuff was still done manually back in the mid-90’s) it would be a screen-printed logo on a faded t-shirt or a copy of a copy of a copy of some once camera-ready graphic. My favorite was a guy who came in with his artwork… and pointed to it… on the face of his watch. “Use that!” they’d say cheerfully and hopefully.

So though I called myself an artist back then, I was mostly a logo recreater. I’d start by scanning it and pulling it into Quark express and later Corel Draw 3 to draw vector shapes over the pitiful thing. I often wondered how much the original designer was paid to do the same labor that I was. Yes, I know they designed it and had to put up with customers of their own, but at that moment, then it was all done and nothing left to do but drawing the final image… how much per hour were they getting?

A lot more than I ever did. Err.

Today you’ve got CD’s full of vector and raster images in black and while, grayscale and full color… and as good as today’s logo recreators have it… I’ll bet that at least once a week some clueless slacker plops down a business card with a 1/8 inch logo and asks for two dozen t-shirts. And I’ll bet it’s 10 times more annoying now than it was in 1995.