 As you said, I'm Jen Hadley, worked with Wisconsin Public Television for a long time. And I started off in print design. And one of the things that I learned in my transition from print to broadcast is that the limitations of the technology required a whole new way of thinking about working with type. And I'd like to go over some of those technological challenges. Manel explained some of them to you. Well, the printers aren't allowed the use of fine detail. Like these early engravings. But our television tools are so crude and clumsy by comparison. Because unless the lettering of the designers kept simple and bold, they may not be clear to our viewer. I love the cold, chill wind that he's so expressive. Anyway, so let's go back and look at those challenges and look at the history and see how we got from this to this to this. We're going to discuss some of the standard graphics that we use in television, titles, full screens, lower thirds, some of you might call them kairans or soups, and credits. The way that images were created in the 30s and 40s was by making something tactile. You could do that by hand lettering. You could purchase plaster letters that you could then affix to a board and light them, maybe move the light around so that you would get a sense of movement and depth. You could do type setting, printing, hot press type was very common, but no matter how you made the graphics, it had to be shot with a camera to get to air. So if you hand lettered, maybe you would then put it on board, put it on a copy stand, and shoot it with a camera. Or maybe you would take your hand lettered title card. You might shoot a slide of it. Make a glass slide, and then we would put it into a special little machine, shine a light behind it, put in a little wee camera, and the engineer could take that directly to put it to air. So let's see some examples of results that they would get with these sorts of methods. Stand by for the opening night of the National Television Service. Hello there, and good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and children. This is a CBS News special report. The Search in Mississippi, with CBS News correspondent Walter Cronkite. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight's special features, the Coming Buyer's Market in Automobile. And this last one has no audio, but I loved the typeface and the title in particular, so I wanted to share it with you. So you saw a bunch of examples there, and they were all created with what we call in the industry TV magic, which is basically craftsmanship, creativity with whatever tools you have available. Those are the tools that they had then. And I'd like to show one of the tools you saw there was superimposition. This is an example of superimposition. That is me and my siblings. And the way that a superimposition would be created is you would take two cameras, one of which would be pointing at the talent, one of which would be pointing at your title card, and superimpose one over the other. And you can see some of the challenges that you end up with. The video gets darker, and the font is not particularly legible because it is by necessity transparent. So these were called superimpositions shortened as soups. And let's see some examples of how superimpositions can be used to make TV magic. Be sure to make that German R good and strong. Now I'll say the word first, then leave a little pause in which you are to say the word, and then I'll say it once more and leave a little pause for you to repeat it again. Let's do that real quick. Margarine, Margarine. I do that too. That's right. The shapes of Texas, Alaska, and West Virginia have one geographic feature in common. A strip of land projecting from the main body shaped hand handle is right. And Regis finishes with a total of 70 points. Five more to go over the top. Four more to go over the top at 269. The 501 figure, the last one we have, it's now about 10 minutes old. It puts them out pretty fast. And I have to show one more example from the German lessons. They're so great. Let's do that drill. Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen. This made me so happy. All right, so another TV magic solution that you saw in some of the title examples was incorporating the physical title into the opening shots. This is a title of a program that was done by my boss when I first got into the business, Sufei. She designed this title as a stone that was going to be carried around the country and put in different locations and shot as part of openings. And I remember her telling me that she wasn't really sure how she was going to like the light falling on it. So they did two versions, one where the title was engraved into the stone, and another one where it was kind of embossed up out of it. And that made me think, wow, Photoshop is a great thing. So this rock was under my intern desk when I first started. I thought it was made out of styrofoam until I kicked it accidentally, and it fell on my foot. So it now lives in Su's back garden where it can't do anybody any harm. So a little more TV magic. Full screen graphics, like you see in the news, pull results, maps, things like that. They had to find ways to make those, make them efficiently. And this is a technique that was used. It was called a pull away. And I just love this technique because of the craft that had to go into it. They had a department that would illustrate these maps, and it was kind of like a pop-up book where you could pull a little window open and reveal some text. The building and the quipping of statewide network is estimated at $3,494,600. That's pretty close to $3.5 million. And $3.5 million is the approximate population of Wisconsin, number of people who would be served by the network. So you can see how the skill and the craftsmanship and having to be hands-on on all this was so important. Credit, something that we do all the time. It was a little trickier back then. You either had to get a couple different ways to do it. In this particular method, you would hand letter or typeset or hot press a long vertical board. You would set it down on a table and then mount a camera looking straight down on it. And then you would slowly pull the long font past that camera. State radio council includes the governor of Wisconsin or his representative, the president of the university or his representative, the state superintendent of public instruction, the secretary of the regents of the state colleges. Another way you could do it is you could take that type and instead of putting it on a flat board, you could put it on a scroll. And that scroll could go into a special machine that could either be hand cranked to roll the text from one side to the other, or some of them had an electric motor. Here's an image of an original machine. And it has that little window in there so that the camera could frame right up on it. This is another technique that was used, both to do credits, opening titles, and full screen graphics. What kind of programs would this service offer us? What would it cost us to build and operate the network? And how would it be administered? Frame up, frame up. The experience. Got it. OK. Just something you still hear in control rooms all the time. Frame up. So, and this last one is a great example from the BBC. I'm guessing 1930s, maybe early 1940s, where they used that roll concept and superimposition to make some TV magic. And apologies for the really poor video quality. So I'll bet with what you've just seen before, you can tell. You can see the tools that they used to make that happen, which is pretty amazing to me. So some of the challenges that we've just looked at, some of the tools they had, let's look at some of the challenges that they were facing to getting quality type on screen. I think you could see how the skill of the craftsmen and the videographers made a difference. Let's look at what they were up against. One of the first challenges was interlacing. And if you were dealing with film, you had a series of slides one after the other, but that's not the way that television works. Television displays the information in scan lines. So when your television was drawing something on, these lines, much more quickly than this, 60 times a second, were reading across your screen. And this is slow down into version, of course. But you can see how that could be a problem for if you had thick and thin lines. Those lines are only showing half the screen at any one time. It helps with the amount of data that you have to get through the broadcast. And so if you imagine those little lines are flickering on and off 60 times a second, you can see where you can run into some problems with them thin horizontal lines in particular. Another issue that we had is halation, which is also known as glow or light spill. And basically the problem with that is that home viewers are looking at images made out of light. And I'm not a scientist here, but you look at a bright light, it glows. I'm looking at bright lights right now, they're glowing. And if you think of looking at a light bulb, it's not the shape of the light bulb. It glows out beyond that. If you take a look at the cross lines over here, you can watch them glowing. And you see the interesting effect that where the two lines meet, the glow is broader. And that's the same thing that happens to text on screen. And you can see some of the examples here of halation and interlacing together and how it can affect how well you can interpret the letter forms. If you combine halation with its cousin Fade, you have even more challenges. If you take a look at the top line New Hampshire, you'll see how it's uneven along the top. And if you look at the X in the middle of Nixon, you'll see that it's bright in the middle and then disappears at the end. That's because where the light is coming through, where it gets skinnier, where there's less light coming through, especially since those interlacing lines are turning those little things on and off, our eyes just don't see it. And so the letter forms become uneven. And lastly, a problem that you couldn't solve no matter how good your design was, no matter how good your broadcasting equipment was. Home television sets are all different. They're all of different quality. So you have the problem of the sets were curved. So any font that you had on screen was necessarily going to have some distortion to it. Plus those home sets, as you can see in the example on the far right, that part at the edge would get cut off. In the center, what we have is an example of a safe title. And the rule was if you wanted to make sure that something was going to be legible on screen, it had to go in safe title, which was only about 60% of the screen. So if you're looking at legibility, you want big, thick letters. If you want to get lots of letters on there, well, good luck, because you've only got 60% of the screen to do it in. So if we take this period of time when all these major networks were becoming a force and they were starting to compete with each other, we're looking at the late 1940s, the early 1950s. We're looking at a situation where competition was creating the need for people to be able to compete for eyes. And at the same time, it was a golden age for Hollywood. They were doing the same thing. They knew you all had TVs in your homes. They needed to get you in there. And so these famous show titles by Saul Bath helped to brand and create excitement. And television wanted to do the same thing. We also found that it was a golden time for graphic designers. Post World War II art schools began to focus on applied arts. And there was a new generation of professional graphic designers who were available to the television industry. Add on top of that, sales of televisions were booming. So you had a situation where all these elements combined to create a market for professionalism in television design. So this is Rudy Bass, No Relation to Saul Bass. And it's a self-portrait he painted. And he was the first director for graphic arts at CBS in the mid-1950s. He was also the first broadcast designer that I could find who really began to analyze the technological challenges to good typography that we've discussed. Previous designers understood the limitations and they did their best to design around them, but Rudy took it further. The first thing he did was to design a font called CBS 36. And his goal was to create a font that was professionally and clean, but still had presence and had a consistent line weight and dealt properly with light bleed. So he began with News Gothic Bold and then he adapted it. As we saw in the previous example, where two lines come together, the light bleed multiplies and Bass's solution was this. Bass took those corners and he made tiny punch holes in the letter forms. And by doing this, he balanced the amount of light that would come through. And he fooled our eyes into seeing a consistent line. And these little holes are called light traps. And those of you who are in print design may be familiar with this, with the concept of ink traps. This is Retina by Tobias Fair-Jones and it was designed to be used at a 5.5 point size on newsprint. And the strange letter forms are meant to be filled up with ink. They are ink traps and Rudy Bass modified that concept to control light. If you look at the example on the left, the comp font, you can see, this is what it looked like before it was broadcast. And you can see the tiny little dots and holes. On the right is what it looked like after it was broadcast. And it would smooth it out and create even glow. This concept ended up being used at other stations as well. This is NBC's version on the right. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the designer's name. This result certainly looks more sophisticated in this use, but I haven't found an example of it being broadcast. So I can't say if it worked as well as the CBS version. So back to Rudy Bass. It's 1968 and he's got a big challenge coming up. It is the 1968 election and CBS was looking to cover the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. And he had to find a way to superimpose possibly up to 4,000 names. He did not want to have to make those all by hand. Rudy wanted to be able to generate an electronic font for use in television, something that wouldn't need to be composed by hand on board and shot with a camera. He knew that at train stations and at airports, the arrival and departure boards used a machine called a Vidiac to display information. But it was all monospaced and they're based on maestrical structures. And as we've seen, Rudy Bass was concerned about typography. So Rudy wanted to be able to use proportional width spacing and he partnered with Stanley Barron from CBS's television engineering department to discuss how it could be done. And since Stanley Barron was an engineer and not an artist, he didn't have a self-portrait. I didn't find any image of him, but this is Barron Stanley. Not sure where he came from, but that's, so we do. Engineers don't paint self-portraits. That's what we got. Working together, they created the Vidafont machine. And this was the first character generator for broadcast television. They also created CND 36, which CND stood for CBS News Division. Bass's custom-designed electronic font for use on the Vidafont. And the result was so successful that CBS sold the Vidafont to many different stations. And memory issues were still a big problem. You could only use one or two fonts at a time, but all of a sudden stations had this new way to get text on screen. And new stations in particular saw this as a great way to expand their service. Lots of other companies jumped on board to create character generators. The Dubner, the Chiron that I mentioned earlier, even 3M had a character generator. What we did not have was designers who were trained on computers who knew how to use them. I think it shows. This is CBS. Coming tonight from the news center, Houston police are still looking for that escaped suspect being questioned about the arson murder of... Just so lovely. So, designers in all fields were still working with spec type and T-squares and X-Acto knives and paste-up boards. And suddenly, designing type for television meant sitting down with your engineer. And finding out what your character generator could do. And today's sophisticated character generators provide clear, legible characters, letters and options such as multiple fonts and variable height and width characters, built in colorizing, automatic centering of words and lines flashing and a memory to store hundreds of pages of graphics. Designed like a typewriter, character generators are easy to operate and of great value when added to the editing system. The amount of type styles, effects and pages of memory are proportionate to the price of course. This was, that was not a joke. That was from like a promotional video for... Anyway, just because you can doesn't mean you should. So, it was a fluke that I fell into broadcast design. I, you know, from print design, it just happened. But I had a benefit that I was natively trained to design on computers. So at least when I came to my first Chiron Max, I was not completely unaware of what I was doing. But the interface was terrible. Everything about it just screamed engineer. In fact, our chief engineer gave me some design advice. He said, do that. He said, he had determined this was the most legible font. This was the best way to do it. And we've moved forward since then. A few years later, we got a new Chiron. And this is the sort of thing that you would see in the 80s and 90s. You can see there's a lot more finesse to the letters, to your options. But broadcast quality still was a problem. It was still causing halation and interlacing. And the set quality still told us what would be legible to the viewer. Between 2000 and 2010, most countries switched to digital broadcasting and high definition signals. And this greatly reduced or eliminated almost all of these problems. We are now at a point where we have the technology to create live graphics that would have been unimaginable 20 years ago. Home television monitors can display HD digital quality images that allow designers much more freedom. And most importantly, we have designers who have the computer skills to work directly with the tools. And once again, elevate television design to the next level. So these are from a Chiron, same machine that I was working on all those years ago. So our next step is augmented reality typography. This is from a video from a company called VisRT. They also create a character generator. And these sorts of special effects have been seen in post-production for a long time. But the amazing thing about what you're gonna see is that these are live graphics. These are graphics that respond to where the camera is. These are graphics that can be updated on the fly as new information is coming in. Thank you for walking through this history with me. I hope you enjoyed learning about this as much as I did. I wanna give a quick thank you to my mentors, Sue Fay and Lisa Curran. Sue came from the design world and fell into broadcast. Lisa started with as a videographer and the production side. And this history of the engineering and the design coming together, put them both in the same office together where I got to learn from both of them. So thank you very much for your time. Oh, and I have PBS Nerd stickers available for anybody who wants them afterwards.