I have truly loved being known as a fanatical supporter of Apple.

I bought my first Macintosh (128k version) about 5 weeks after they came out in January 1984 from ComputerWorld in the Astro Shopping Center on Kirkwood Highway in Newark, Delaware. I paid $2,495 for it.

One Macintosh story

From 1988 to about 1997 Cypher + Nichols + Design served as the advertising agency for Alanx Products, makers of wear-resistant parts for hard rock mining equipment. Starting a new campaign for Alanx we designed the “Moon” ad below left.

You had to produce a set of CMYK films for the ad which was sent to the magazines and stripped in for making the printing plates. Our films were produced by LithoColor here in Newark. In the early 1990s, it was no small task to accomplish things like having that product shot lay overtop of the photograph and headline. It was a very time consuming process and required a serious degree of craft. Also, the merging of the “chocolate syrup” border was a huge effort, working by hand with Xacto knives & “Rubylith.”

The first set of film negatives for the “Moon” ad cost our client $2,250.

We were heavily committed to Macintosh, but moving from a mechanical done on Illustration board to one on disk took a serious leap of faith. In the two months between those two ads we decided to bite-the-bullet and give “all digital” a serious try. We tried rather deliberately to not make the retouching Ray was going to have to be doing in Photoshop (I believe it may have been 2.0) any more difficult than we needed to, but those four elements to the product shot were all photographed individually and the headline type does appear to run in behind the product shot.

The cost for those four CMYK films for “Grand Canyon” was $72.50. We never used Illustration board for a mechanical again.