Omnicrom, not Omicron!

There was a moment last week when a particular group of people smiled and gazed nostalgically into the middle distance when they heard the word, Omicron.

I was one of them.

We are not sick; we are graphic designers who used the Omnicrom machine in the 1980s (notice the slight spelling difference).

When I was still at school, I spent my summers working in design and advertising studios. As someone gaining experience, my main job was tea, PMT camera operation, and the Omnicrom machine.

Back then, text for visuals was painstakingly set with Letraset transfers, then shot by a PMT camera, making the artwork a crisp, black and white bromide. I then had to clean up the bromide artwork with a scalpel and lighter fluid, and then if we were feeling fancy (sending a visual to a client - by courier or POST!), we used the Omnicrom machine.

The Omnicrom was essentially a hot foil machine; the foil was rubberised, flimsy, awful stuff that tried to stick to everything as you applied it to the right area of the artwork. So if you wanted to show the headline was red, you would roughly cut the foil to fit and then feed it through the machine, so it sticks to the text.

I would have to put an overlay sheet on the artwork, so the awful stuff didn't rub off onto anything!

Oh, how times have changed! What do you do now that took a week to do before computers became your primary tool?