I agree wholeheartedly!
Trust me, as one who has been around since letraset, parallel motions, set squares and rotring pens and who made the very early transition to AutoCAD and Photoshop, I am only too aware of the requirements of the industry!
I guess Oculus Rift and 3D printers will be the next big things!!!
Cheers,
M.
Missed this one. Do you recall Leroy lettering devices? Killian and Nugent loved those, even though they had no style. then, there were the rub on letters (letraset, I think) I recall working all night on a rendering for the bosses, only for them to come in the next morning and immediately noticing I had left out one letter of the clients name. Since we were working directly on chipboard, that was hard to fix.
Dick's daughter worked for a drafting store, and got free over runs that didn't sell, so we got about five years worth of "Souvenir Bold" sheets that greatly affected their graphic look. The most popular types of the time were Helvetica and Arial (still popular) Then, there were the "Kroy" lettering machines, which stamped letters on transparent sticky tape that you put on the drawings.
Then, there was CAD and Word, with literally dozens or hundreds of type choices, and most still choose Arial or a variation. There was even a type that replicated architectural lettering, but that felt like cheating......
I have lately experimented with Candara, Century Gothic and Toledo typeface (feel like that kid in "The Middle" who is obsessed with fonts......) as there is some thought that its time to change long used fonts to update plans look to 2016........
But, for all the tech and look changes, architects of all types are still notoriously bad spellers and poor technical writers as well. I have told the story before, but for years our plans and specs called for the contractor to install work with "free form defects" (instead of free FROM defects) because that passed spell check, and we didn't perform our own old fashioned eyeball test well enough.
PS- Richard, sorry for thread drift!