1975 Hostess Printers Proof

[steve B]

Here's my take on it, which can be taken as just a semi-educated guess, since the place I worked did smaller jobs and nearly no proofing at all. I saw maybe 1-2 photographic proofs pulled from the masks in 2+years.

There are lots of reasons to do proofing, and those reasons change over time as well. I think in the 70's there wasn't much input from the players, but now I believe they can approve the final product.
Either way, for product packaging like Hostess, there would have been someone (Or more) responsible for the overall look of things. So they'd choose the photos they wanted, then try them out on a partial panel. Obviously they at one point did it without the borders, which may not have been designed yet.
That would eliminate aesthetic problems that weren't obvious.
So for example, lets say there are 5 people working on various parts of the set, and they each pick photos for certain players. Someone else picks which players would go on which box, maybe that product sells poorly in KC, so they want Brett on that box.
But three different people have picked the photos, and to make an extreme example all three pictures show a similar portrait. Obviously that makes the box panel look a bit odd, so they either have to change the player selection, or pick different photos. Hopefully that would get caught before proofing!

It seems expensive, and at the time was since color separations and plates had to be made for each color, and some number of copies run. Totally out of the question for the sort of orders we did, but not for a huge national promotion.

I have a few from 76 that as far as I can tell were proofs, but considering where I got them, they may have been issued.
They're a "bit" different from the issued cards.....


I need to scan the rest of the ones I have, but you get the idea. They could be ones where they printed red and yellow swapped, but the screening is different, very coarse on some, there were a few reversed negatives, and at least one number over 150.
I've never seen any others, and of course being a dumb HS kid when I got them, I immediately traded about half of them for another example of the card I'd traded for the whole batch.