“We hope to have the map of Jura back to normal as soon as possible.”
My first and best job ever — what I worked while I was a student at Cooper Union — was as a graphic designer for the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour.
It was news I was proud to be working for, and it was 1989. That meant I was crazy young, super junior, and that about 50% of the graphics on-air (those little pictures over the shoulder of the newscaster) were still produced by hand. That meant a stat machine, Pantone paper, x-acto knives, and an airbrush.
As the kid, it meant that I could use the Quantel Paintbox better than anyone there (think Photoshop 1.0, but a dedicated machine) but also that I wasn’t allowed to (think broadcast unions). So I spent most of my time painting maps and flags, including a lot of flags that no longer exist. These used a lot of paintbrush ink — on a big news day, there would be a low haze over the graphics department cubes.
South Africa was in the news constantly back then, and a lot of my maps were of the region. Remember, there was no looking anything up except in books, and then tracing the maps I found. Like every other day, I colored in the land with a gradated burnt umber over orange, and cut out blue paper for the water.
One day was different, and it was a typewritten letter from the government of Lesotho, which had been opened and left on my desk. It was a very polite appeal to me to stop fucking representing the landlocked country of Lesotho as a lake in South Africa.
I was too embarrassed to write them back, but did fix it from that day on, and will never forget how easy it was to accidentally delete 2 million people. It seems much easier now, which is perverse, but on the other hand, it’s also much easier to fix. Khotso, Lesotho. Forgive me.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 