In an ideal world my career would be at a pinnacle point right now. I ought to be creative director of either my own company or at least a senior designer in a smart design agency. I wonder where I went wrong?
It could have been the decision I made to go to college after spending 5 years working in printing as a paste up artist. It was a difficult time for printing. 1984/85 saw the Wapping Print Workers Dispute. The whole industry was in flux. The Unions were suddenly being stripped of power, the days of the ‘Closed Shop’ were numbered and new technology was moving in. During these troubled times ‘Old style’ printers, were facing competition from the dreaded ‘instant copy shops’ and these floundering leviathans were falling all around like mighty oaks. It was sad to see the old letterpress machines redundant and rusting in auctioneer’s yards. I got a little sick from the carnage and took myself off to Art School. As I didn’t hang around long enough in education to go in the regular route I had to take the back door and spent 2 years at Pontypool College on a B’Tec Diploma in Art and Design.
Returning briefly to my years in secondary education, while I enjoyed Art as a subject, and I liked the teachers I never received any real encouragement to take it further. That could have been just my general lack of confidence instead of any lack of talent as I perceived it, and anyway Art was never a serious contender for a career. It was more of a fluffy past time. During my time in school the art rooms where my sanctuary and haven from the mêlée of everyday life.
Apparently B’Tec is now a bit of a dirty word, but it was the equivalent to an art foundation and that suited me fine. Most other people on the course had just finished their ‘A’ levels and I had been working for 5 years, but I wasn’t the only ‘mature’ student so we had quite a good group. I loved it there, it was probably the happiest time of my life. I had no responsibilities, I could spend days at a time working on a painting or a drawing, mess around with printing techniques. The Art department had some fantastic teachers, the Head was a fiery lady called Francis Woodley, who scared the crap out of us! Then there was Denis who taught print making, Lawrence and Hugh who taught graphics and a recent graduate of Cardiff University Ceramics MA – Billy Adams. I met some of my oldest friends during this time so if my career took a turn for the worse because of this deviation I don’t regret it one bit.
All together I spent 5 years in Art School. After completing the 2 year B’Tec, I was lucky enough to be given a place at Camberwell Art College to study, not Graphics, but Ceramics. Graphics would have been far too sensible and I was hooked on the excitement of 3D design, mixing exotic glazes and the fire and smoke of the Raku Kiln. I went from provincial Welsh Town girl to London Art Student. God I was a dick! The trouble with Art College is you’re surrounded by ego and in order to fit in you have to develop a healthy ego yourself. Now don’t get me wrong – I had a fabulous time, but perhaps I could have spent a little less time putting my outfit together and swanning around the college bar and a little more time learning something useful, like how to get a job once you’ve left college. But again I would struggle to regret my time in Camberwell, even if I did waste a lot of it. Happy memories of walking up Peckham road from Camberwell Green in the bright Autumn sun, kicking the fallen leaves which lay thick on the ground and the anticipation of new beginnings will always stay with me and make me smile when I’m struggling to find the money to put petrol in my car to go to my mediocre job.
One of my favourite websites is still www.potatoland.org. I discovered it not long after we first got online (12 years ago!) One of the games on there is called ‘The Shredder’. Its basically an alternative web browser. Usually a web browser will read the HTML code on a web page and read it back the way it was intended by the designer. What ‘The Shredder’ does is interpret the code in a different way. The results are quite freakish. I like it! The lettering is all jumbled up, the sizes dont make sense, the images are all over the place – Chaos! Love it.
Here is my Christmas wrapping paper design – with a bit of shredding thrown in!
Christmas wrapping paper
I have been a graphic designer since about 1982. It was completly by accident as it happens. I left school on the day of my last exam and vowed never to return – not even to get the results. I didnt have an enjoyable time in education so had no desire to pursue it any further and not having much of a clue about what to do with myself, I let one of my mums friends pursuade me to become an Avon Lady. It was a short lived career as you can imagine. Im really not cut out to sell anything let alone make up and jewellery and trudging around the estate with books that were never returned and orders that were never paid for was not my idea of fun.
From a young age I was artistic. Drawing, painting, scribbling. I used to play with paper for hours! any kind. I used to cut out pictures from magazines and play with them. Yep, I was a wierd kid! One of my favourite things to do was ‘make’ magazines. These were bad copies of the real thing but they were small works of art to me. Hand lettering closely copied headline fonts, cartoons, adverts, competitions etc. So I was quietly pleased when a friend of the family said the industrial unit opposite his was recently let by a printing company who were looking for someone to train. He mentioned he knew of someone of artistic pursuasion, who had nothing better to do, and naturally put us in in touch. The company was a lithographic printers. It was called Pacebrook Printing Company. It originated in Gloucestershire and was a family business. The staff comprised of the owner - a very jolly gentleman who was mostly absent and busy at the other site, his son who ran the 2 presses and taught me all about pre-press and me. We were eventually joined by a girl who took over running the other press and another graphic designer.
I worked there for a year and learned so much about pre-press. This was back in the day before Macs and Adobe had reached our small corner of the world yet! All the artwork was created on drawing boards, the type and pictures were stuck down on layout paper with either spray mount or hot wax. My best friends were a scalpel, a pair of tweezers and a centering ruler. The amount of times a vital bit of type would lose its stick and end up attached to the bottom of my shoes was considerable as were the ensueing ‘typos’. Any straight lines were drawn directly onto the layout paper using rotoring pens. Once you got the hang of them they were amazing but they didnt tolerate fools very well. ! There was a certain knack to twisting the pen as you drew it along the ruler and god help anyone who used a plastic ruler for cutting along.The resulting gouges would let the ink run under the ruler and resulted in a puddle underneath your nice, neat line.
I soon learned how to ‘cut out’ smudges. If the smudges and leaks got bad though, you really had to start again. There was a real sense of skill once you had picked it all up. And wow, if you ever managed to get the angle right with a flexi-curve, you had arrived!
This was my training, you had to be anal, single minded, tenacious and not mind spending long periods in the dark room with an oversized camera with huge halogen lamps and windy handles. I spent many hours locked away and would eventually emerge, saucer eyed, having wasted rather alot of film and paper, but with an image or a line of type at the exact size I wanted. I loved, loved, LOVED – intant art books. I still do and have a really good collection and now – joy – I have a scanner, so I can scan my favourites in and use them again.
Another cool bit of dark room kit we had was a headline machine. You sort of fed through the strip of letters until you got to the one you wanted and then took a picture of it. It was very primitive by todays standards, but I really liked it. Once you had all the wording you took it out and developed it. You could make the type bigger or smaller under the camera. It had more interesting fonts than the ones on the IBM and they were bigger in size. I took it for granted at the time, not realising how its days were numbered. Now I cant even find a picture of one.
I sort of miss it, while I’m installed here at my Mac, and taking 20 minutes to complete a job that back in the day would have taken several hours. I miss the fact that there was a skill and a pride in what you had created. Not that I dont now, but its so much more removed. Plus, you wouldnt let any Tom, Dick or whoever lose with a scalpel and a sheet of letraset! Now because everyone has ‘Word’ and ‘Publisher’ the work seems to have lost its value. ‘You can do that in a few minutes cant you?’ I get asked quite frequently. Its quicker – yes, but not that bloody quick!
I find the amount of typefaces rather overwhelming these days. I mean, how many versions of Helvetica do we actually need? When I first started I had an IMB Composer. It was a fancy electric typewritter with a memory and a set of golf balls. Everytime you needed to change the font, including to go ‘bold’ or ‘italic’ you had to stop the machine and change the golf ball. I had a drawer with 4 families of fonts. Helvetica, Times, Baskerville and Century. That was it! Well unless you count the headline machine, but even that only had about 10. Now the choice is mind boggling. I was asked recently what my favourite font was. I have dreamed of such an interview question, but when it was asked I honestly didnt know what to say. All my best fonts tried to jostle out at the same time like shoppers getting through the doors at John Lewis on Sale day. What came out? – Ariel! Im such a nerd!
