Clients. But they haunt my wake ;-)

I'm well under fifty and have used my share of Letraset sheets, thank you very much.

tyypos

I'm well under fifty and have used my share of Letraset sheets, thank you very much.

Hear, hear! I'm glad I'm not the only one!

I had a dream the other night that I was designing a newspaper page, and as I worked, things kept moving around and it was like I could never finish. It's not quite a typographic nightmare, but I figured you guys could relate somewhat to it :D

a rubber-cement pickup that won't...

It's 5:05 on a Friday. 1985.

The typesetter has closed up shop for the weekend.

The client calls with a list of urgent last minute changes (in about ten languages) to copy on a job (already printed) that has to be in Japan on Monday.

Not a nightmare, but I once designed some glyphs while falling asleep.
The results were drawn in part by my subconscious, and were amazing.
But they're on the hard drive of my Amiga in the garage...

hhp

Publisher's POV: getting the final bound copies from the printer, opening them up, and IMMEDIATELY spotting something wrong – and checking back you find it was wrong on the proofs but you didn't spot it at the time. Argh.

Dave, here's a true story from the days of rubber cement.

I once worked for a textbook publisher who published a book about behavioral science, and the author's first name was Theadore, not the more conventional Theodore. We hired a freelancer to design the cover and when he submitted his sketch, someone looked at it and said "The author's name is misspelled," but we checked and it was correct.

We had the designer make the mechanical, and when it was done, someone else asked, "Is the author's name spelled right?" After verifying that it was, we sent the mechanical to the printer, and when the printer sent their proof, the same thing happened: The spelling of the author's name was queried, and yes, it was supposed to have an a.

A few weeks later, the bound books were delivered, and copies circulated throughout the office. An assistant in the Marketing department came over to Production with a copy of the book and said, "Behavioral is spelled wrong!"

We looked at the book, the printer's proof, the mechanical, and the sketch, and on every one of them, it said Behaviorial. We had all been looking so hard at the author's unusual name, no one had seen the error in the title.