Lessons from a Paste-up Bunny

All through college I had a night job as a production assistant at a publishing company to help make ends meet while living in Chicago.

Four nights a week, I took other people’s graphic designs and built them into “paste ups” – a full-size representation of a page that eventually became the plate that was fastened to the printing press.

It was not a creative job. It was entry-level. And they typically hired only women for the task, so they called us the “paste-up bunnies.”

During my four years there – 1986 to 1990 – the production shop changed completely. We started as a “cold type” company – where we produced type with film and chemicals – to desktop publishing, the click-and-drag world we live in today.

For my first three years there, we lived and died by “the grid.” Every page was divided up into a grid of non-repro blue lines that were 1 pica ap…