One of my first jobs as an artist was working with South Carolina Equestrian Magazine as their art director and illustrator. It was a dream job for a horse-crazy girl that loved art. I was just 20 to 21 years old fresh out of taking several illustration courses in Greenville Art Museum. The museum soon after began offering degrees for the same sequence of courses I took.
Spot illustrations were the big bulk of illustration work done for the magazine. These were designed to be easy to reproduce at small scale. The size you see above is pretty close to the actual size in the magazine. It made it much easier to fill the layout so you didn't have large gaps in the copy. You didn't create them with InDesign back then. You literally used a huge machine bigger than a chest freezer to print the text on paper and then cut and pasted the text and illustrations together using temporary rubber cement. That was then used to create the plate. It is so much easier now.
