Miller Freeman- Portable Computer

Portable Computer 1983

This is the first issue of Portable Computer magazine published by Miller Freeman in San Francisco. Computer magazines at this time were making the transition from trade magazines to glossy consumer magazines.

The Art Director was Peter Tucker who was a joy to work with and I produced quite a few editorial pieces for him over the years.

The theme of this piece is ‘Death of a Salesman’ from Arthur Miller’s play of the same name, always a potent symbol of economic change. For the Willy Loman character I took a photo of a designer friend called Larry Green, he just had the ‘look’. Larry had a wonderful studio in North Beach where I worked for a while with John Tomlinson, another English ex-pat.

I had no knowledge of computers at the time and 1983 was the beginning of the consumer computer boom. It was interesting to think of the implications of this emerging and burgeoning industry.

For illustrators at this time the implications were not apparent. Magazines were still produced in the traditional fashion using photomechanical layers. The print industry supported a wide variety of services, art directors, graphic designers, photographers, typographers, illustrators, agents, media sellers, art-workers, paste-up artists, re-touchers. And this is even before it gets to the printer for the guys who have to assemble the films, colour separations and plates and press operators. All of this connected by an army of bike messengers and all this activity for an essentially ephemeral enterprise.

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Portable Computer Nov/Dec 1983

The second commission from Miller Freeman and Peter Tucker. Gigo stands for Garbage In Garbage out, which seems quite prophetic for 1983. Here I am in Terry Gilliam mode.

I mentioned earlier that I had no knowledge of computers and you can see that glaringly demonstrated here. I couldn’t get a handle on how computers look and so ended up with something that looks as if it’s made of Bakelite and from the 1940’s. The 2001 look had not quite arrived. ‘Yessiree Bob’, computers were brown in them days’.

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Portable Computer 1984?

I wasn’t happy with this piece at the time and it seemed too obvious a solution to the accompanying article’s theme of business and computing. A very dry subject, but something that has affected us all in  a profound way. The gentleman’s head displays that rather bland passive expression, or lack thereof that speaks of management systems and cybernetics and control. It seemed like a new thing and It was a culture you couldn’t fail to pick up on in the office culture of the time, especially if you were a freelancer who worked from home.

For some reason I quite like this piece now and it reminds me of the box illustration for a model kit I had at Canterbury called the Visible Head by Revell or Renwal.

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Portable Computer 1984

 An Illustration to go with an article about putting the power of a mainframe into the palm of your hand. The buttons on the hand look like typical calculator buttons. I believe this was the last Miller Freeman project before Peter Tucker moved to A+ magazine in Palo Alto.