Go, Read: Robert Boyd’s Tribute To The Late Designer Dale Yarger

Robert Boyd has a lovely tribute up to the late designer and art director Dale Yarger at his arts blog. Boyd worked for several comics companies through the 1990s and into the early 2000s; his time at Fantagraphics in the early '90s overlapped with Yarger's reign as that company's primary art director. I liked this graph in particular, about the design choices Yarger made on the Best Comics Of The Decade book series.

"Now all you younger designers might be thinking, big deal? Aside from this being an elegant solution, keep in mind that these covers were done before Quark, before Photoshop, etc. The desktop publishing revolution was just around the corner, but it hadn't hit Fantagraphics yet. So that means that he shot each of those images with a stat camera, cut out the parts he wanted by hand, waxed them (so he could paste them down), and pasted them on a sheet of clear plastic, which he then attached to a lay-out board with a tape 'hinge' and instructions to the printer to print this layer in black at 30%. And that was just one of the many hinged overlays he created for this cover. (The text that reads '1980-1990' for example was not typeset -- Yarger hand-cut those numbers out of a rubylith overlay.)"

Boyd's piece isn't just a tribute to Yarger, it's a reminder of how different comics has become in the past two decades (when I started work at Fantagraphics 17 years ago, I didn't have a computer) and how ingenuity and hard work have always been at a premium.
 
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