We grew and changed and moved and changed and grew.

We’ve done work for big companies, medium sized companies, small companies.

We’re a family business. This, invariably will include you. As a part of the family.

We’ll tackle just about anything. Anything. Having been in business as long as we have, we’ve got lots of experience.

We are here to help.

The long.
Used to be there was photography. It was an art. And a rarefied one at that. Some people had cameras, there was a thing called the Instamatic, which was a Kodak camera that was for simpletons, and there were more complicated cameras for serious amateurs and even more serious ones for pros. You pretty much took your film to the drug store and a couple of days later you’d get your pictures. That’s about the time our company began. We could do great photography and we could develop film and print pictures. Today, with every cell phone capable of pretty cool photography, it hardly seems like a business, being able to take pictures. It was, though. It’s another example of how times change and perceptions evolve, too. We were in White Plains, and back then, the early 1960s, there were at least four different places just like us. In White Plains, alone. And, by the way, a dozen drug stores that could get your film developed and printed. Plus a couple of camera stores. The world has changed. Have you noticed?

From photography and photolab services we expanded into slides. Now, slides were the precursor to PowerPoint. You designed the slide, set the type, did the artwork, made a negative image of the art, hand colored the clear areas, photographed it with Ektachrome slide film, mounted it and then inserted it into a slide projector which projected the image against a screen. It sounds like a lot of work to get five bullet points up on the wall, but it worked. More than that, it’s how business was done. And we were in that business. We did thousands and thousands of slide shows for IBM and Pepsi and a whole bunch of companies that don’t even exist anymore, like General Foods, American Can and AMF. Now, in order to do slide shows, we had to figure out typesetting. In the 1970s the third revolution in typesetting was starting to happen. The first was when Old Man Guttenberg invented the idea back around 1450. Until then it was all done by hand. Then Otto came up with the idea of using carved wooden blocks in the shape of words, lining them up to make sentences and paragraphs and pages, slathering them with ink and stamping them on pages of paper, repeatedly until you actually had some primitive form of mass production. They sewed the pages together and, voila, books. Pamphlets. Magazines. Flyers. Petitions and writs. Annoying circulars from the supermarket.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

The second revolution in type was when another German looking to upset der alt apple cart came up with movable type. The idea was to be able to take metal slugs of letters, push them together, forming words, and so on. Then, when you were done, you could take the words apart and do a whole new set of words for some other purpose. Brilliant. So that worked pretty well for a couple of hundred years. And then, bang, we’re into the 1970s and someone smart figured out what was called phototype.

A stream of light, through a negative of the shape of the letter, and then onto photo paper, developed you’d have typesetting. Brilliant. Done with some craft you’d have typography. It was a lot less cumbersome than those old typesetting machines with their metal slugs. Coincidentally, we knew about the photographic process, so it was a natural evolution. It made doing a lot of slide shows easy. We had only to learn that particular craft. Which we did. Which allowed us to begin to explore other areas where typography applied, namely, design.

Graphic design is a pretty complicated thing. There are the basics and the fundamentals and the rules and the conventions and then there’s the breakthrough. So you need to know the history and the norms and the expectations and then you need to know how and where to break it all apart and come up with something totally new. A tall undertaking. We hired some people who actually knew all that stuff and became a pretty damned good design company. At the same time we were doing slide shows and all the photo lab things. Which added up to a pretty cool little company. Mostly, at that time, when companies needed to do stuff they had to aggregate a lot of services from a whole bunch of little companies. People had to go to one and then another and then another company to get stuff done. Or they could come to us. So, among other things, we did slide shows, as mentioned and people wanted to have us do the projection, too. Doing the projection was the start of running the meeting. The meetings required themes and slide modules and videos and room decor and planners and so on. So we started to do that, too. And video grew into a pro-standard level of video production. Soon enough we were doing everything.

To be fair, we should mention the next few revolutions in typography. The Mac. The Mac. And the Mac. First somewhat limited, downright laughable. Then not so bad. Now it’s the way everything gets done. So we’ve ridden through a series of evolutions… no, revolutions…over an increasingly compressed time frame that have us where we are, today.

Which brings us up to now. (This is the condensed version of the story; check back in a year or so and you can get the book.) Now we’re organized around five areas. Marketing Communications. Graphic Services. Web/Video/Digital. Meetings, Events & Trade Shows. ThinkBench. Each offers first rate talent, first rate technology and the right attitude. We can help. That’s our mantra. Throughout the company. We. Can. Help. As complicated as our business has become, at our core, that’s what we believe.