THAT "DESIGNER" LABEL

I got slightly distracted from bloggeration over the weekend which is why I just posted my hospital visit diaries for the last couple of mornings. Well, I suppose it provided an update for anyone who’d been interested in those things, and it gave me a chance to experiment with a tiny, tiny bit of graphic design, just to keep my hand in, as it were.

Of course, when I trained as a Graphic Designer it was back in the days of  rub down transfer lettering, paste-ups and process cameras, and within a very short time of me gaining my qualifications the whole world of Graphics went computerised and a lot of what I’d learned was pretty much useless in all practical terms, and, to be honest, even towards the end of my eighteen month stint in the late 1980s unemployment wilderness, I was rapidly approaching the point of becoming unemployable as the wacky world of design sped away from me and left me behind with a huge and hefty, arm-stretching portfolio full of increasingly tatty looking drawings that were probably neither use nor ornament to anyone.

Luckily, I was saved for the design nation by the world of small ads which embraced my meagre talents, let me use those “old fashioned” layout skills in a professional environment for a while, and even trained me on those new fangled computers when they finally arrived.

Oddly enough the quantities required and accuracy needed to hit daily targets in that business could seem pretty brutal as you scrambled to meet them day in, day out. I have often wondered what might have happened if a college lecturer had given a group of students a “real world” exercise one morning and asked them at 8:30AM to have thirty or more finished pieces of artwork ready to go by 4:00PM that afternoon. I remember some of my fellow students having something approaching a breakdown when we were once given a mere three weeks to produce one slightly complex project that was supposed to show off how much we’d learned in the previous three terms.

Over the years I’ve had to come to terms with a few things. I’ve always considered myself to be a less than great designer. I’m not awful at it, but equally, I’m not brilliant at it either. I’m sort of average. I don’t have that instinctive genius that seems to come so easily to some. I can produce some lovely stuff, but it doesn’t come that naturally to me. In general, in terms of Graphic Design I suspect that I produce “middle-of-the-range” or “blunt-end-of-the-business” artwork and luckily that was usually good enough.

This is why I always worked better in a Graphics Office for a company rather than as a freelancer. Once I get a grip on the required “corporate style”, I’m prepared to become very proficient at producing artwork to their precise requirements. It’s just when someone wants something “new” or “off the wall” that I can start to stutter or drop the ball, because I do tend to have very fixed ideas on what will work and tend to get a tad befuddled when others don’t quite see things the way I do.

After the small ads I moved over into the gaming industry, where one manager and his underlings did their very best to undermine and destroy any confidence I might have had in my own abilities, a legacy that I’m still trying to get beyond even today. I noticed when I attended an “end of business” party with the small ads crowd back in September, that someone had been kind enough to dig out many of the little drawings and caricatures that I used to do “just for fun” outside work hours and displayed them around the venue. It was very kind of them to do that, but it did make me realise that I stopped doing that kind of thing once I worked in the gaming industry because I genuinely was led to believe that my drawing skills were frankly not up to much, and I rarely draw for pleasure at all these days.

I did, however, try to keep my designers eye in (in a small way). For a couple of years I created the odd single-colour poster for my local amateur dramatic theatre, although I was never massively impressed with what I produced as the equipment I had at home then and the printing techniques they chose to use were seldom satisfactory. Even then I craved to be able to use some photographs, even though I didn’t have a digital camera, but I did notice that when I was no longer required to produce them any more, that was indeed the route they chose to go down.

Trying to move around in the business got harder and harder as I was no longer the young, fresh-faced and vital youth I once was (if I ever was), in an increasingly youthful profession. Once, in a mad desire to move away from that manager and his cronies, I had an interview (well, the teenaged studio junior looked at my work) where I was told in no uncertain terms that “You’re not really a designer, are you?” Another bullet dodged was the interview I had with a two-person outfit that had recently lost one of the persons and was being run by the other person, who was about eight months pregnant when she interviewed me. I was not what she was looking for, so I stuck with what I was doing, but, three months later I noticed that the office I was interviewed at was up for lease…

Luckily, the job I do now is a much better fit with my current skill set, so I can happily refer to myself as a “Graphic Artist” and do that well, without having to make any bold claims, or carry the baggage that the “designer” label carries.

Anyway, in the small hours this weekend, whilst I was up early to listen to the cricket live from Australia, I had a bit of a “designer” flashback and I decided to tinker with a logo idea I’d got after I’d got involved in a “rebranding” discussion online on Friday. It’s not for public display, because I imagine any “real” designer out there would laugh and point, and also it uses a real business name so it wouldn’t be fair to publish it, but it was pleasant enough to be just tinkering around with an intellectual exercise and attempt to solve a design problem again.

I guess that if you have ever been a designer, the desire to design never really leaves you.