visiting printers to sign-off work usually means spending two hours in dense traffic for an average of 10 minutes spent asking the man in dirty overalls to make it ‘a bit more green, but also slightly more red & a bit less green… if possible…thank you’
so today was no exception and the above result is what i came home with almost four hours later… it was worth it
i spent the afternoon today, at design agency ‘koeweiden postma’ in amsterdam, helping young teenagers to design posters for a project as part of the weekend school together with alex (from design agency ‘lesley moore’), photographer ‘jaap stahlie’, my friend bas van der paardt & several others volunteers… like everyone else i felt it would be good to put some energy back into the business we all work in & live well by…
the kids were mostly thirteen, not the most academically bright ones and considering i have absolutely no qualifications to teach (let alone to kids with learning difficulties) it was a bit of an eyeopener for me!… i will post some of the pieces we made (in a very short time) when i have checked if that is ok…
after graduating back in 1988 i moved to cambridge and started my first real job as a graphic designer, this logo for a local photgraphy studio was one of the first things i made (at least the first job i’m prepared to show anyone these days) it really reminds me of all kinds of ‘things’ that were in vogue at the time (certain colour schemes and some very dodgy decorative fonts) more interestingly to me on a personal level is that i’m reminded of the fact that we had no computers at the time (yes kids there was once a world without macs) i remember drawing the whole thing on colour-separated acetate sheets, by hand… it was actually printed at considerable expense to the client in four pantone colours (how should i know? i just wanted to use lots of colours)
it is now also very clear to me what influences i was subject to at the time because many of them can all be found in this one logo, particularily dutch design…
the ‘f’ and dotted circle for example can be traced back to the ‘holland festival’ logo designed by studio dumbar a year earlier (see below) and at the time all over the place in UK design publications… the slanted rectangle was something i had seen a lot in the work of ‘total design’ whom i visited in amsterdam in that same year, the dark blue script font was a typical feature in the work of ‘vaughn oliver’ at V23 who was then (and now still) a big hero of mine…
so what’s the point to all of this nostalgia then? well nothing really except that looking back at old work can be quite revealing, if you dare to do it…
