The year was 1981. We had a brand new software company as a client—VM Software, and they needed a poster to attract visibility at a trade show. The 80’s were a tumultuous time in the technology space. Mainframes were king, and it would be the mid to late part of the decade before we would even own a Macintosh which we leased along with a 10″ (maybe 12″) monitor, keyboard and mouse, for the princely sum of $15,000.

Along with my former partner, Alex Berry, we conceived a poster that would take the famous Hokusai wave and morph it into a new format—representing the transition from analog to digital and is reflective of where the software/hardware industry was starting to move. Mainframe technology and legacy systems were on their way out, and a new order was in its infancy. The internet was still just an experiment and would not be available to the public for many years to come.
Getting an image of the Hokusai wave was easy. I then contacted an illustrator that I had worked with and asked him if he would be able to create a digitized section of the map. Brad Pomeroy labored on creating hundreds of tiny little squares by overlaying an acetate sheet over a copy of the original lithograph and coloring each and every one by hand using Prismacolor pencils. While Brad was working on the digital version, we tried to figure out how to attack the line work. While this might be easy today using Illustrator or Photoshop—back then those programs did not exist. Instead, I had two designers laboriously ink each line on another vellum overlap using rapidographs and ink. Since the line work had to be precise, each artist could only work on it for 1/2 hour at a time—so three of us spent untold hours switching off. I still get requests for copies of the poster and people often want to know what program I used to create it and what filters I used. I get a chuckle out of that thinking that this poster really did portend the wave of the future. Oh, and one last hidden clue that I have never revealed—the Japanese calligraphy in the top left hand corner—it means “Grafik.”