You've come a long way, little logo

About fifteen years ago, I had a call from Larry Boccioletti. He wanted me to use the tag line “The Big One” on our poster to differentiate our fair from new ones that had sprung up. I was using a page layout program on my Amiga called PageStream - long on promises and woefully short on delivery. One of the few things that did work was a primitive means to force a font to follow a curve or a shape. I used that feature to transform Larry’s tag line into a logo. By 1998 I had to abandon the Amiga, which had spiralled down into bankruptcy, and decided to build a WinTel machine using Windows 95 - an OS disaster compared to the Amiga OS. I was able to convert the logo vector file into a wmf file and move it to Windows. I initially used Microsoft Publisher, but soon tired of its cartoonish icons and gee-whizz antics. Then I accidently came across the very first release of InDesign at Future Shop - bargain priced for users switching programs - and it could read my wmf file. Last summer, when I wearied - really wearied - of Windows, I moved to a Mac.

A few weeks ago, I volunteered to help Bob Lansdale by doing a full page poster insert for the journal. Since I had a few weeks grace, I put on my thinking cap while doing chores around the yard and came up with a fresh design. I had the bright idea of using the logo as a mask in Photoshop on a crowd scene. I was very surprised to find the original wmf file in the stuff I moved over from Windows and even more so when Adobe Illustrator converted it to a format that Photoshop could read. The result worked out just fine for our new fall 2008 fair poster. The little logo has happily jumped platforms and formats once again - a little bit of the 1990s Amiga has survived through stops on various Windows machines to arrive on an iMac running a modern OS.