When I was in high school I had an internship with Lyn Severance, the graphic designer for Ben and Jerry's. It was a huge opportunity, but I was also shy and awkward, more comfortable with daydreaming and the quiet of cows. But still, I watched, and loved the colors and lettering and layering of things.
The first Ben and Jerry's was in an old gas station on the corner of College Street and St. Paul. I was ten years old when I waited in a long line for a hippy to scoop ice cream into a freshly made waffle that formed a cone. There was vanilla, of course, but everyone was talking about the new flavor, oreo mint. No one had thought to put bits of other things into ice cream before, and it was a really big deal. Ice cream had always been in a box in the freezer at home and, if you were lucky, had a stripe of strawberry or a few chocolate chips. Oreos in ice cream? A multi-million dollar idea made from two things that had been right in front of us all along.
In my teenage efforts to become a graphic designer I meticulously and patiently rubbed Letraset transfers, letter by letter, onto a faint line that would later have to be very carefully erased in order not to rub the letters back off. I traced over drawings with pencil onto tracing paper, then rubbed that pencil onto a clean sheet of paper in order to make a copy. I had to visualize very carefully how a design would fit in an area before I began drawing, and screwing something up meant starting entirely over.
The images in our memory are frozen in time. Sometimes I find it hard to picture that old classmates, who still have feathered hair in my mind, have moved on as technology has. I think they're still out there using white out, or are tethered to phones with cords. I want to tell them there is this cool new thing called the internet and you can do ANYTHING on it REALLY fast. When you do a project you can start over and over and no one will ever know what a mess it once was, and in no time at all it can look this way or that way or like this.
The images in our memory are frozen in time. Sometimes I find it hard to picture that old classmates, who still have feathered hair in my mind, have moved on as technology has. I think they're still out there using white out, or are tethered to phones with cords. I want to tell them there is this cool new thing called the internet and you can do ANYTHING on it REALLY fast. When you do a project you can start over and over and no one will ever know what a mess it once was, and in no time at all it can look this way or that way or like this.
Oh. You already knew?
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