DAY 31 - Back to the Drawing Board, Old Main

I am a 1982 graduate of Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary. In June of 1992, I went back to work for my alma mater as publications director. My job was to assist the various college and seminary offices in designing pieces for print and mailing and then to coordinate the bidding for, and printing of, those pieces. The most difficult part of the job was working out the technical specifications and securing a decent price for the printing. But about a year before the end of my three years as director, I was approached by the Alumni Services department and asked to create something a little more challenging.

Alumni Services was looking for an art piece that could be incorporated into an award -- a framed certificate -- to be given to alumni in recognition of their service to the school. The idea was to take an existing symbol associated with the school and work it into the design. From the school’s founding in 1924 until it was finally torn down in 1997, the most iconic piece of architecture on campus was the Peter Neff mansion (we called it Old Main). As I recall, I was asked to use a black and white photo of the mansion (taken I don't know when) as the basis for a pencil or ink drawing.

I really did not think that I could do the photo justice, so I suggested an alternative.

Most of the simple one-color and two-color publications that I designed back then were done in the now-defunct Aldus PageMakerⓇ (later Adobe PageMakerⓇ, replaced by Adobe InDesignⓇ). At the time, PageMaker was the go-to for desktop publishers and perfect for anything that wasn’t too high-end or too difficult. The photo in question was really a beautiful shot, taken from the columned porch side of the building. I took the print and scanned it using a filter that rendered photos as line drawings. Then I pulled the “line drawing” into an early version of Microsoft PaintⓇ where I removed anything that I thought took away from the image. The finished drawing could then be laser printed or transferred to a photographic positive for press printing.

This is a picture of the final certificate in the framed plaque that was presented to me by the Alumni Department when I left the publications department in the summer of 1997.

Cincinnati Bible College & Seminary, later renamed Cincinnati Christian University, officially closed in 2020.