A “PROPER JOB”, A MOMENTARY MELTDOWN AND REMEMBERING T.P.

Historically, apparently I’ve never had a “proper job”. Despite having spent twenty plus years sitting at various desks slaving away in the Graphic Design industry, this is apparently “just drawing” and is looked upon in much the same way as “art” seemed to be at school; Something that the “less than bright sparks” did to fill up their timetable. Obviously I would disagree, but it’s one of those prejudices that has come back to haunt me in recent months. It’s amazing to me how little respect the work I do gets from some of my nearest and dearest. I think because of the nature of my work, and where I happen to do it, they don’t think of it as a “real job” at all, that I can just drop everything in an instant and it won’t really matter. I must accept that very few people have actually died due to me failing to finish laying out my type, there’s still important work that gets done in this much maligned industry that, since the advent of the home computer, everyone thinks they can do nowadays, and whilst I must also agree that most people can knock out a flyer or an invite that does the job, it takes a different set of skills to do it well.

Another thing, maybe people do die if the graphics are wrong. If the text is too small to safely read, or if it’s been written wrongly, inaccurate packaging on medical products can prove fatal, and hazard warning graphics save lives. As do motorway graphics and a hundred other bits of design that we take for granted as just being there, and which surrounds all of us every day, not that anyone ever seems to realise that all this stuff has to be designed in the first place.

It’s always been the same. One of my lecturers told me the story once of how he proudly went home and presented his first professional design work to his mum and told her that he’d designed it. “What, you printed it?” “No, I designed it…” “You took the photographs…?” “No, I designed it…” and so on. I remember my grandmother asking me outright what Graphic Design actually was and despite pointing out that just about everything she actually had in her home had some sort of design involved in it, and that her kitchen cupboards were crammed full of products emblazoned with Graphic Design of varying successfulness, I don’t think that she ever really got it.

In fact I remember her quite blithely telling me once that “it’s not as if you have a full time job” because I happened in those days to finish at 4.00 PM, despite having done the same number of working hours as any other office worker, and after all those years I spent trying to explain what Graphic Design actually is she still never recognised what I did as being “work ”  as she understood it.

Well, I guess it’s hardly coal mining, is it?

Mind you, even in one of my previous jobs there was a sense that it’s really only “just drawing” (another hangover from their own schooldays I guess). In an effort to explain the disparity of wages in his development department one of my managers once explained that he had to pay the engineers more because they had to get “Professional qualifications, you know? Degrees and that…” to become engineers. I remember his absolute shock (and disbelief) when he was told that the artworkers they employed had to have qualifications in order to get their jobs as well, and some of them even had degrees in design. But then, apparently a design degree isn’t a proper degree it would seem – it certainly never improved the wages. Maybe they believed that we’d knocked the certificates up ourselves in some design software and printed them out on our laser printers…

In more recent years, whenever I spotted a youngster carrying those distinct portfolios we all used to lug around the country with us before it all got put onto shiny discs, I was so tempted to stop the car and tell them to choose another career. I never did, of course. That would have been freakish.

Respect the job. It’s only fair. After all, we try to respect everyone else’s. In that spirit, I’ve been given a rather excellent publication called “Just My Type” by Simon Garfield which takes the whole art of typography (one of the many disciplines that make up the profession of Graphic Design) and makes a rather lovely and very real actual book about it. I love the way that whenever he mentions a font, like Times New Roman, the text is then printed in that font. Subtle, but artful, and it probably loses a lot of its impact on an iPhone or as an Audiobook. I particularly enjoyed reacquainting myself with some of the terminology that I should have remembered but had forgotten over the years. Things like “UPPERCASE” and “lowercase” actually referring to the cases of metal type that we used to cast on, and where they actually were in relation to where the setter stood, because the lowercase letters were used more frequently and so needed to be more accessible for the setters, or “minding your ‘p’s and ‘q’s” referring to how similar they looked when you were casting them back off again. I’m (just) old enough to remember physical type-setting, and I seem to remember quite enjoying it.

Meanwhile, back at the coal face, I do worry some days that my sanity is unraveling and I sometimes think that my ability to cope is rapidly diminishing as I spiral on down with too many things to think about and too few things actually managing to get done...

Am I alright? Of  course I’m not alright! It’s bloody freezing in my house and I’m completely on edge waiting for the bloomin’ phone to ring for the promised release of my mother to happen even though I know it’s not going to be any fun... and I just noticed that I’ve been disconchumulated by one of my FizzBokkers, so my pathetically paltry number has now dropped back down to a slightly awkward odd number again (regular readers will notice here that I miss the even number and not whoever it actually was)... and the anxiety over the incoming workload that I’m trying to cope with has suddenly increased adding to the fundamental feelings of stressfulness which I’ve got hanging over me… so there I was, trying to do my job as various members of my nearest and dearest decide that they can keep on shouting “jump!” at me and I’ll blithely just ask them “how high...?” and I didn’t sleep... and I feel utterly, emotionally drained... and then I remember that my mum and dad never got to spend any of their marriage without the awful grandparents making their lives miserable because my dad didn’t outlive my grandmother and I’m sure as hell not going to let that happen to me, but then it seems that I’m 20% more likely to snuff it younger simply because I live in North Blogfordshire rather than South Blogfordshire... and that likelihood is on the increase again they say thanks to the NHS who aren’t in my best of books at the moment anyway…

Sorry, just a little stream-of-consciousness thing happening for a minute there… Calm again now…

Just when I was getting the idea that the day probably couldn’t get much worse, I clicked on the BBC News website to see what’s happening in the world and find out that T.P. McKenna has left this mortal coil. Not a household name nowadays I’m sure, but one of those faces that you would immediately recognize because he’d been in just about everything over the years, and was one of those actors who appeared in so many of those classic series of the 1960s and 1970s, although I remember him most clearly from his role as David Callan’s Soviet opposite number in the final series of “Callan”, most notably in the final trilogy of episodes “The Richmond File”. Once again, I feel a need to pause and to raise a metaphorical glass  - I don’t know, this time maybe of Jamesons? - to his memory.