DYING ART

Out of the blue, I got asked to do some illustrations the other day.

Naturally, I declined.

“Why?” you might ask “Is this not some glorious opportunity to add to your reputation and bank balance?”

Probably not.

Still, when someone you’ve had very little to do within perhaps a decade or more sends you an email asking “Do you still draw?” it is a time to reflect soberly upon where your life actually is at the moment.

After all, I did used to draw. Quite a lot, actually. It just stopped being “fun” when I had to try and earn a crust doing so, and somehow, because I was doing it during the daytime in my role as one of life’s underlings, it somehow never seemed like something that I’d want to be doing when I got home in order to unwind.

Oh, I know that there are people who make quite a tidy living by coming home from work and doing another day’s work on their “freelance” stuff, but I tend to think that that’s the sort of thing that younger, fresher, more eager minds than mine want to spend their lives doing.

It’s a bit like the wordsmithery, to be honest. Sitting here blogging to the indifferent world is what I do for “fun…” but, in the unlikely event of someone deciding on commissioning me to write some words for them, the shutters would bang down, the “significance” curve would head towards the sky, and the fear would grip me and, ultimately, I know that not a word would seep out.

(So, if you ever want to find a way to finally shut me up… Then you know precisely what to do, don’t you…?)

Drawing for fun is something that I do still do from time to time, actually. Usually when I’m on holiday, or when an “amusing” idea strikes me, but drawing to someone else’s agenda, well, that’s really no fun at all.

The enquiry was something to do with a children’s book… something to do with jungle animals, and, because I’m me, even after having said no, I couldn’t resist doing the slightly rubbish pencil scribble which is attached to this posting, just to make sure that the immediate idea I had escaped from my head and didn’t lurk inside there colouring my dreams.

I gave a few reasons or excuses for not wanting to pursue the matter; Being far too “rusty” to be much good at it, my mother’s Estate consuming all of my weekends, time-management issues, all of the usual guff… but the truth is that I just don’t think that I could do it any more, and, I suspect, that I don’t have the patience for it, either, and I do believe that I was always a bit rubbish at it anyway.

And also, in my admittedly limited experience of such things, I decided that it would probably involve a great deal of effort for very little reward, a massive amount of annoyance when my efforts turned out to be “not quite what he had in mind” and, eventually, as the extended silences stretched on and my confidence collapsed accordingly, I would probably end up letting him down completely in the end.

Either that, or he wouldn’t like what I’d done, or the finish, or the style, or something else, and I’d stroll away from the situation feeling all bitter and twisted like I used to do in the old days.

To be honest though, during my few forays into “Commercial Illustration” I very quickly realised that I really dislike doing several drawings of the same thing because doing things more than once utterly bored me, and those “could you do something similar but at a slightly different angle” chats were just too bloody annoying for words when you’d just spent a couple of days on something.

Also, I was never really good enough. I’ve always been a mid-range, mid-ability scribbler and, whilst this means that I could make a living, it was never going to mean that I showed any natural flair or talent for it which would make me a unique and sought after commodity.

No genius living here, Mrs MacTavish…

Of course, what I should be doing is grabbing the opportunity with both hands. After all, when you reach my age and have a career path like mine, it’s probably a good idea to use whatever pitifully few contacts you have left to make sure that you’ve got something you could do to earn a crust once you’ve been flung onto life’s scrapheap as well as giving some thought towards having a “profitable sideline” that I’m known for and can be relied upon to fulfil.

Sadly, I’ve never been much of a one for forward planning and thinking about what I could do rather than what I couldn’t, so I never seemed to achieve such wisdom.

In the end, I passed on the details of another friend who I thought might be better at it and thought I should let sleeping dogs lie.

Interestingly, it seems to have been a week for old friends getting in touch. I got an email (or personal message or somesuch) from an old college friend, and we exchanged a few interesting memories of the old days for a couple of hours, and it was also the birthday of another old friend from those times this week, so I had a brief chat to her, too.

Maybe we’re all just getting to that kind of an age.

After all, once you start to reach those “significant” ages, we all want to cling together in the cave, staying as close to the receding pool of firelight as we can, whilst the darkness full of those unseen wild animals closes in around us.

IT WASN'T JUST ME

I went into the newsagent's shop the other Tuesday morning, as I usually do, in order to pick up the latest issue of the "Radio Times" and found myself having the following exchange, after having glanced across at the spot on the shelf which they are usually stacked in and thought that the old one was still there.

"Have you got the new Radio Times…?"

"I've put it out, mate…"

"But isn't that last week's edition…?"

"No, I put the new one out this morning…"

I went back and realised that this was indeed a brand new edition, although its similarities to the previous week's issue was, I felt, at least for the casual observer, close enough for this to be a very simple mistake to make.

Anyway, feel in like an idiot, I picked up a copy, parted with my £1.80 (!!!) and disappeared off into the dark morning, wondering whether I was just getting old.

Mind you, given the similarity of the colour palette, the similarity of one of the main photographs, and the near replication of the banner flash advertising the free book offer, I still don't believe that it was that foolish an error, even though, once you put them next to each other, they're really not all that similar at all.

But I do wonder how many other potential buyers have been put off this week by making the same elementary error… after all, as Sherlock himself once observed, we look but we don't observe, although, given the current fan base that Mr Cumberbatch has (Cue utterly gratuitous picture of his mum, back in the day, using the excuse of her uncredited cameo in the first episode of the new run to justify the inclusion), I don't suppose that sales would suffer, although making such a design choice does seem to be a minor blunder on the part of the designers.

Happily, when I got to work, m'colleague, who is a subscriber to the official organ of the BBC, was complaining that his copy had arrived in an envelope the previous day and he had begun a small rant about how they'd sent him last week's copy again by mistake before he had noticed the dates were in fact correct and it was indeed a brand spanking new edition that he clutched in his hands.

So it wasn't just me, then...

NOT MUFC

This is NOT me, okay...?
Any resemblance is strictly coincidental.

I am not now, nor have I ever been Manchester United Football Club, although I sometimes wish I had their money…

Such is the slightly strange and surreal nature of my life that I was recently mistaken for that particular footballing institution in an email. This, I think, is quite odd because the resemblance between myself and an internationally followed football team is slight at best…

They run around the world playing their little games in front of various crowds of people and have a huge stadium parked somewhere on the very edge of the city after which they are named, and a group of very vocal fans all over the world, and I’m…

Just some bloke in an office somewhere.

And yet someone still made the very basic yet fundamental error that implied that they really couldn’t tell us apart.

Okay, so I’ll tell you what really happened, although I’m sure you’ll have already figured this out for yourselves. After all, you’re all intelligent, discerning and rather brilliant people (otherwise you wouldn’t be here in the first place…) but if I don’t bother to tell you, then the rest of this page is going to look very blank indeed.

It might still look that way anyhow. Those words are yet to be found…

Okay, to explain. I work in the exceedingly unglamorous world of Graphicke Designe which basically means that occasionally I have dealings with printers to whom I send what is usually derisively referred to as my “work” for them to transmogrify into our finished product, whatever it might turn out to be this week.

This means that those printers do, on occasion, have to liaise with me and ask me questions of the “Are you really sure you want us to print it looking like this?” or “Where are all of the linked files?” or “Did you really think this was any good?” variety and so, because they’re terribly efficient in their homespun “We’ll change all of it and he’ll probably never even notice” way, they do me the simple courtesy of adding me to their computer’s address book just in case they ever decide that they might need to explain exactly why they decided to change everything that I had sent them because they “reckoned” that it would look “far better” done their way…

But, putting the long-standing feud between the designers and the printers aside for a moment, this does tend to mean that I quietly lurk forgotten and unloved in the “M” section of the computer of someone whom I’ve never even met, and this means that, if they’re in a hurry to reply to that oh-so-very important email that they’ve just received, they might just click on their pull-down menu and accidentally click on the wrong “M”

Me…

Which is why I now have some terribly exciting pictures taken backstage at the TV studios of Old Trafford football ground which were, I presume, supposed to be printed out at a large  size over the weekend for some publicity event or other that’s supposed to be happening quite soon.

I’m sure that they’ll still be able to print them of course. After all, they were merely attachments being bounced back to me in some misdirected reply, but it amused me for a moment to, rather ironically, be mistaken for one of the biggest footballing clubs in the world.

It’s probably rather flattering that it’s such an easy mistake to make. It happens all the time. I was once mistaken for the Taj Mahal, you know, and the entire island of Madagascar, and I’ve never told you about the twelve years I spent as the Maharajah of a small far eastern country best left unmentioned, have I…?

SIGNS

One of the things that I love about America is its signage. It can be so fiendishly complicated that it makes exiting the Freeway the most terrifying of prospects, and yet so fiendishly simple and direct at the same time. In marketing terms, no opportunity for a bad rhyming couplet is ignored so that a small town pizzeria, for example, will survive on the most excruciatingly awful punnery.

“We toss ’em… They’re awesome!” is the one that has stuck with me (which goes to show that it works…) but there were plenty more, and such techniques really become ubiquitous as even a little pizzeria like that will have signs bearing its slogan on the highway anything up to fifty miles away so that a silly little phrase like that one will have already stuck in your head long before you get to the town itself, and the familiarity of seeing it again and remembering it from when you were on the road is very effective.

We didn’t eat there of course, but I’m pretty sure we got some nice shots of the outside of their shop.

Wherever you go, some little shop or other will be doing its level best to draw attention to itself. That is, of course, only to be expected in a country which is so brutally led by market forces. Sometimes it seems as if every available surface has been covered with as much marketing material and signage as is humanly possible, and then they’ve added some more.

In Sonoma, for example, every sign we saw seemed to bear the logo “Sonoma Signs” in the corner, as if someone had personally made it his mission (or at least his job) to provide as many signs as it was humanly possible to do in one small town. Still, perhaps even in America there must come a saturation point where nobody else feels that they need any more signs, and if that were to happen, what would become of his small-town sign-making business?

More evidence of this could be seen in the central valley where every farm seemed to have a hand-painted sign in very similar style showing the name of the farm, a picture of the farmer and his family, and a picture of whatever fruit or vegetable they grew. It was almost as if a sign-painter had gone to every door of every farmhouse and asked them if they wanted a sign painting for next to the highway, which is, I suppose, precisely what did happen.

As we were strolling around the various small towns we visited recently, I became rather obsessed with the signage, and started pointing my camera and clicking at just about every sign I saw. Perhaps it was the latent graphic artist in me resurfacing, whilst I was supposed to be “off duty” (although can anyone who works in the visual arts ever really be “off duty”…?), but I did so much so that I probably have far too many of the dullest set of holiday pictures ever taken.

Interestingly too, I was mooching around in a gift shop towards the end of the trip, wondering whether the luggage weight allowance would allow me to buy a couple of books of old postcards which I was looking at when the proprietor of the restaurant attached to the shop came in and told the woman behind the counter that she was to allow the young girl with him to take anything she needed and charge it to him. Then he rather proudly gave his reason. This young girl was going to be creating their “new” signage in the near future.

He seemed very impressed, in that way older men can sometimes do when around a young girl, that she was able to recreate “By hand!” pretty much any typeface she wanted to. Even though I was inwardly snorting with derision at another example of a graphic artist convincing another customer that something that comes so easily to us is something deceptively complicated, on later reflection I realised that the old sign-writing skills are probably very rare in this day and age where much of the typography that you see is laid out, created and rendered on machines, and perhaps the ability to hand paint such things is far more unusual than it was in my day when hand lettering skills were ten a penny.

Certainly now, when I begin the endless trawl through all of those photographs that I took, I’m more aware of just how many old hand-painted signs there seem to be in the parts of America which I have visited, and they are the ones that I remember especially clearly, and on the old photographs in that postcard book that I did eventually buy and bring home, it is the old signs that speak to me of  old-time America and how different a “Go get ’em” world it seems to have been from the repressed, understated ways of old Europe.

I suppose that maybe, like a lot of holiday snaps which include certain things that might seem currently a little mundane, perhaps one day they’ll be seen as historically fascinating even if, at this precise moment, even I’m just looking through them thinking “Why on Earth did I take that one…?”

When it comes to my snapshots, for example, I can get quite irritated when a modern car sneaks into the frame but, in about twenty years time, perhaps I will look through them again and be intrigued by all those old cars and bizarre fashions that we once wore and have to remind myself why all the people who kept getting “in my way” were looking at tiny little screens as they walked along.

The potential for million “Channel 57” retrospective evenings about the first part of the century, with social observers, columnists and radio DJs burbling on about things like “Do you remember iPhones…? Yeah, I had one of those… I could never get it to work properly…” comes to mind and I shudder at the thought…

FLATLINING

Sometimes, things that are going on in your life start to flatline. There’s nothing you can do to stop it happening, they just do, and for one or two things in my life this is indeed now the case.

I should, of course, count myself to be very lucky. These things that are flatlining are very trivial things of precious little importance to anyone except me and my admittedly fragile ego. Nobody that I care about, at least nobody I know about at the time of writing, is literally flatlining on a surgical gurney somewhere, although I must keep in mind that somewhere somebody actually is, and so my trivial metaphors are likely to become very crass very quickly if I’m not very careful.

We must always tread carefully when it comes to the possibility of upsetting complete strangers. Less so with those who know us well, but even so we should proceed with caution.

As an aside, but nevertheless something that has struck me as I write these things, when it comes to matters of flatlining, we ought to consider this week of the 60th anniversary of the succession of our monarch. It has struck me a number of times across the years that, whilst the nation sees this as a cause for celebration, for the person themselves it marks the anniversary of the death of a parent, and so it must always be a bittersweet moment, and I can think of very few jobs that you can only get in life because your father or mother dies so that you can take over, and where the takeover is so very public.

Suddenly, my own ponderings upon flatlining seem very trivial indeed, and I am tempted to stop here instead of continuing to dig the hole I so obviously am for myself this morning.

“If you’re in a hole, stop digging...”

But this is me, and you know that I can never do that...

Anyway, I do worry that things like these writings have a tendency to flatline, almost as much as the numbers of people reading them. You see, I told you that it was such a trivial matter, but then I led you on, making you think that perhaps I had a more pertinent point to make, even though I hadn’t. I am, as ever, mulling over the pointlessness of these witterings whilst simultaneously proving their pointlessness as I do so. But it does still bother me far too much, both my own lack of inspiration and the paucity of those returning to have their imagination stimulated.

Thankfully, recently I’ve been able to focus on other things...

I have, for example, been working on a script. This is, of course, a bit of an achievement nowadays as I was pretty much convinced that my script-writing days were far behind me, and yet, a reason to write one cropped up and somehow I have managed to stitch together a few hours to do so. Granted, as ever, I doubt that it’s actually any good, certainly not in a “life changing” way, but it’s nice to revisit the form and prove to myself that I can still do it, even if it’s ultimately another of my pointless exercises.

I’ve also been working on a bit of design work, filling up more of those precious free hours with a bit of the kind of thing I am supposed to be “best” at… A follow up to the summer time poster that I did was required, to cover the other half of the year, and an opportunity came “out of the blue” to create a new logo, and, whilst these are never things I ever make a penny out of doing, it’s very nice to find that the world still thinks of me and believes that I can do such things, even though I have my doubts that I really can and, to try and save face, I constantly have to remind everyone how rare and precious those “free” (in so many ways) hours can be.

I’ve also been working on the bizarre world of Blog tag, now firmly established in the uncharted waters of the once defunct Writers’ Group blog and being popularly ignored over there. Creating an ongoing narrative, however bizarrely plotted, using the technique of a kind of game of literary “ping-pong” (or “whiff-waff” if you prefer) is proving fascinating, even if it does tend to chew up even more of those few free hours that I used to use for “better” things. There are, after all, only so many words that make some kind of sense, or nonsense, that you can successfully churn out in any one day...

Consequently, what I’ve not been doing is spending much time in Lesser Blogfordshire, but then, neither has anyone much else been either, hence our topic today of “flatlining”. This is not, I suppose, a bad thing. Granted, from a personal sense of self-worth, it’s not been a good thing either, but, as the wise man once uttered (presumably somewhere in the South Bronx), “Them’s da breaks, kiddo, them’s da breaks!”

So where do we go from here...? Do we try and resuscitate the ailing patient or just let him slip away into the big sleep, drift away towards the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns...? I need to learn to focus, to put all my energies in one direction instead of letting myself be dragged off on all these ever-so-tempting tangents that keep my mind stimulated away from its dreadful tendency to have a far-too-low boredom threshold and far, far too easily distracted....

But, oh hang on, what’s this? Is there life in the old dog yet...? I’m sure I saw a blip just then... Do you see it...? No...? Well, I’m sure I did... Nurse...? NURSE!!!

SELLING OUT

Oh, it doesn’t take much, does it? No matter how firmly held the beliefs and principles, it really doesn’t take much to cause you to wobble and fudge when the chips are down and the arm is being gently twisted. Scratch, as they say, the surface of any “bleeding heart” liberal, and you’ll find the fascist within.

I used to think that I was better than that. I used to believe that I would be capable of digging in my heels and saying  a resounding “No!” if the question was ever asked  of me. I used to be 100% (and absolutely no more – but that’s a rant for another day) certain that if the stormtroopers came a pounding on my door to take away my (obviously metaphorical) brother or my sister, then I would stand firmly by their side and resist any injustice because of what I believed was truly the “right” thing to do…

Principles.

Firmly held beliefs.

Absolutes.

There’s no room for a wobble. These things may not be fudged. We believe what we believe and we must be resolute in our defence of those beliefs because they are what make us who we are.

And then there’s a phone call…

“Can I do a favour…?”

And suddenly I’m sucked into working for the betterment of a whole world that I have steadfastly refused to support despite so many pressures over the last few years. One tiny phone call on behalf of a member of my extended and far distant family and I’m sucked into what I would otherwise refer to as a whole world of pain if that really wasn’t to over-egg the McMuffin.

For good or ill, in the far distant corners of this fair land of ours, live a few members of what you might be surprised to learn are known as blood relatives of my humble mashed potatoey self. They are even known to admit to the fact that they are related to me every once in a while, despite my best efforts to be the antisocial git that you have come to know and loathe through these dark passages.

One of the younger ones works for a fast food company of international reputation and I don’t really have a problem with that. It is, after all, work, and they do seem to look after her and nurture her career, and in this day and age that really is no bad thing. I mean, yes, you can rant and rail against corporate globalisation, after all I know I have, and you would, like I have, no doubt be making many fair and valid points, but the bottom line is that they are an employer and I am related, by whatever cosmic accidents have made it so, to one of their loyal employees.

The problem is that I’m really not a huge fan of theirs, and, over the years, I have not been backwards in coming forwards to say so. Personally, I choose not to eat there myself and am as resolute as it is possible to be about this, even though people have been known to sit near me eating their happy little lunches and allowing the tempting aromas to drift in my direction and specifically nosewards.

Sometimes it really does smell so good, but I’ll also tell you now that, whilst on an individual meal level these aromas can seem slightly tempting, on a larger outlet scale, the wafting stench of the fat and grease can still make me feel slightly nauseous and bring on an almost instant gag reflex.

You see…? Hard wired…

I’ve read the Naomi Klein book. I’ve read “Fast Food Nation”. I like to think that I know what’s going on and, despite years of just refusing to eat there, despite the endless arguments with colleagues who are also parents insisting that “You have to eat there if you’ve got kids…” (No… You don’t!), and, despite the fact that the occasional business meeting seems to inevitably happen in the nearest outlet to an industrial estate, I have resisted as best I can. After all, there’s not really much you can do when your boss plonks a hot bag of food down in front of you and says “I’ve bought you lunch” other than meekly eat it all up with as much in the way of thanks as you can muster, but as a general rule of thumb, this is not my preferred choice as to where I would personally choose to get my meals.

Yet it only took one telephone call asking for a favour from a member of my family who works there, and I found that I was working – however obliquely - for “da man”.

And it was “da clown man” at dat…

Shudder…

Now I feel unclean, but let me try to explain.

Qualifications are being studied for that require a certain amount of marketing skill, but not everyone studying marketing necessarily has much in the way of design skills. They do, however, sometimes know someone who does and who might be able to suggest a few pointers in that direction and show them how such things might be achieved, and also, perhaps, make some more general observations about alternative ways of thinking about the same problem and how different sectors of the perceived customer base might perceive certain information that you wish to share with them.

This is how I found myself arranging a certain amount of McMarketing text material and various McPhotos into a vague example of a basic layout on a recent Monday evening in October, just as an example of how these things might be done. Just a couple of hours shifting text and logos and photographs around on a screen to try a few different ways of showing the same basic information couldn’t do any real harm, could it? In my defence, I tried very hard not to read the content too closely, and I did refuse to proof-read and correct the content (just my little act of rebellion), and I’m still crossing my fingers and hoping against all hope that “da man” won’t be able to profit from anything I might have suggested (although, who am I trying to kid…?), and now I really, really fancy…

A salad.

Maybe that will help me to cleanse my soul.

A TIME OF ENDINGS

This last few days seems to have turned into a bit of a time for endings for me. Before you get all concerned or anything (as if you would), I’m not referring to any major personal disasters or anything significantly dramatic like that, nor has (as far as I know) my “status” (as it seems to insist upon being referred to nowadays) shifted in any discernable way, it’s just that the wheel of life seems to be turning to a new cycle, the page turning and other metaphors that probably don’t bear closer examination are doing their thing.

Perhaps it’s the time of year. The equinox passes and the cricket season ends to be replaced, with substantial overlaps with the footballing one and, for some bizarre reason, despite the fact that the blazing heat of the summer should be transforming into the dull greys of a damp and soggy autumn, the reverse seems to be happening in the meteorological world, which will no doubt lead to much confusion in our own biorhythmic cycles, as well as for those in the natural world.

Will the squirrels fail to start hoarding their nuts? Will the birds start to lay eggs that cannot possibly hatch? Will the flowers start to bloom and the trees return to bud? Will all those enormous spiders scuttle back into their warm little nooks, only to return even bigger and stronger when the cold comes back again…?

I’m going to need a bigger bowl…

This unexpected “warm spell” could catch us all out. I went to have a haircut last week, which meant an ending for my old hairstyle (if you can call it a “style”…) and the entire salon was baking in the heat, and dressed as if on holiday, although I was reliably informed by the chap who wrangles my remaining tresses that it was “hotter here than Portugal” from which he’d just returned from a weekend’s “stag” do.

Doesn’t anybody just go to the pub any more for such celebrations…? Is everyone else just made of money…? Or does he just hang out with a wealthier crowd of people than I don’t…?

As I arrived at the hairdressing emporium, they had all of their shutters down, and I began to suspect that they’d relocated without telling me, but it was just their only way of keeping the sun from turning the place into an oven because the heat was being unexpectedly combined with the sun being ever so low in the sky at a time of year when its effects would normally be safely hidden behind the slate grey of our “normal” weather…

For the same reason, those of us who are motorists, cyclists and pedestrians are having to take extra care to look out for each other as the sun remains right in all of our eyelines at just those times of day when there’s the most of us about.

I wonder if the seasons as we know them are gone forever, or whether this is just some kind of a “blip”. It’s certainly become noticeable that April now seems to be turning into the “best” month of the year, although I also notice that various comments I read at the end of August which were lamenting our so-called British Summer and how dreadful it was, seem to have forgotten all about what they were saying as they bake merely one month later.

So, what has all this got to do with endings, then? Probably very little, except for the fact of the time of the year, but there seems to have been a lot of them happening, at least for me, lately. There are the obvious ones that I’ve already mentioned on other days, like the ending of one kind of professional lifestyle to have it replaced with another. Basically, if it needed explaining further, my company now has premises that I am required to work in, rather than letting me work in my own home. To be fair, having all of us "remote workers" based in an office has been the plan since I was interviewed three and a half years ago, but it kind of kept getting fobbed off, not least because there was no real advantage to it.

However, as you'll already be aware, the graphics industry keeps on evolving (other theories are available...) and the nature of the work and projects we are expected to do requires much in the way of mutual training and co-operation, so the plans have finally been put into action and there we are.

This brings me to another ending, as, with Apple’s introduction of “Lion” as its new and “improved” operating system, my beloved “FreeHand” software is no longer being “supported” and must finally be consigned to the dustbin of history and I must learn new and alternative ways of doing my old familiar work. Back in the old days, when I felt that I still had something useful to contribute and was vaguely cutting edge, I found exploring new programmes rather exhilarating, and was rather “good” at it, for what it was worth.

Nowadays when I open up a new software package and just go “Wibble!”

A lot.

Meanwhile I'd just like to pause and reflect for a moment on the final demise of FreeHand, which is still, to my mind, and to the many others who learned to love its simple majesty, one of the finest graphics software packages that there was. At least, I suppose, it’s rather nice to report that it did, at least, “go up to 11” which is, I suppose, significant, if only in a “Spinal Tap” kind of a way…

Then there’s the passing of Blinky, which I’ve also mentioned at length elsewhere, the ending of another year’s “Doctor Who” which was rescheduled to take advantage of the darker autumnal evenings and ended up being broadcast on the hottest October day on record, and the departure of the much-loved Gordon Burns from “NorthWest Tonight” which I actually found all rather moving when it finally came. Being a bit of a blubberer myself at such times in my own life, I really don’t know how they get through such emotional transitions with a great big camera shoved in front of their faces. I suspect that in similar circumstances I’d’ve just “cried off” and not turned up for my last day, but then I always was a bit of a coward when it comes to goodbyes.

Remember this when I finally decide to pack in this blogging lark, won’t you…?

I suspect we’ll all get rather used to these media departures over the next few weeks as the BBC shuffles its packs and implements its relocations, but I hope that they’ll be handled with as much dignity as that one was.


We’re coming to the end, my friend,
We’re coming to the end.
There’s only so much time to spend,
We’re coming to the end.

THIS MEANS NOTHING TO ME

We walked in the cold air… Freezing breath on the window pane… Lying and waiting…

I got given this box of biscuits recently. Thank you very much, by the way. They were terribly nice, much enjoyed and probably added inches to my waistline, but I thought it was worth the risk. I was on the very brink of putting the box in the recycling bag when I paused and noticed it, as if for the first time, and it made me think for a moment.

A man in the dark in a picture frame… So mystic and soulful…

Graphic design has always been a funny old animal, but the packaging for this particular “Marks and Spencer” product really gave me a moment to pause for thought. Viennese biscuits, all packaged with the kind of love and respect that only one highly trained in the Graphic arts could truly put together…

A voice reaching out in a piercing cry, it stays with you until…

Viennese biscuits, do you see? Viennese. Someone, somewhere has made a startling leap of mental connection to give this packaging the very best sense of that elegant cultural centre that they could muster, just to persuade you that you can be part of those exotic, erotic worlds by simply nibbling on a biscuit housed in a box that speaks volumes of the march of history and one city’s special place in it.

The feeling is gone only you and I… It means nothing to me… This means nothing to me…

Just look for a moment at the images on this piece of packaging. It has the air of genius about it really. Biscuits placed into things that are thought of as being quintessentially Viennese. A decadent, swirly biscuit standing centre stage at the theatre, another strawberry emblazoned one sitting comfortably in a decadent looking gilded armchair of dubious provenance, yet another being rather rakishly the subject of an elaborately framed portrait, and two more coquettishly stuffed into some dodgy looking ornate candlesticks. A whole intricate world of decadence and indulgence weaved into the very fabric of a box of biscuits.

Oh, Vienna!

Aren’t you just transported to the old city? Can’t you just hear the strings of the violins as they sing out the most exquisite melodies? Haydn and Beethoven, Strauss and Schubert sitting in a coffee shop idly picking at elaborate cakes and watching the ladies pass by an their elaborate ballgowns on their way to the opera.

The music is weaving… Haunting notes, pizzicato strings, the rhythm is calling…

No? Sadly, neither am I. Nor am I getting the pleasing waft of the baked strudel, or the sausages sizzling away on the street vendor’s stalls. Mostly, I’m getting biscuits. Harry Lime does little to ply his wicked trade in the sewers beneath my feet as I gaze upon these photographs of biscuity goodness, although the harm the biscuits themselves are probably doing to my own sewer-like complex intersections of arteries might be considered comparable as he runs for his life and the zither gets ever more frenetic.

Alone in the night as the daylight brings a cool empty silence…

Do you yet hear the roar of the cannon or the clattering of the horse’s hooves as the heart of the Austro-Hungarian Empire beats to the rhythm of the Napoleonic wars? Does the crunch of the biscuit echo the crunch of ten thousand army boots trudging through the snow? Does the rich creamy filling remind you of a city divided, torn into four by the aftermath of a later, even bloodier conflict, its hopes crushed to crumbs by ten thousand other jackboots?

The warmth of your hand and a cool grey sky, it fades to the distance…

Does the soft lapping of the blue Danube soothe your mood as it drifts languidly by on its way from the dark chocolaty forests of the north to the distant Black sea? Does a bite into the soft liquid centre cause a sudden snap to ring out across this peaceful scene and turn the heads of a thousand startled birds to look your way before flying away?

A rather high proportion of biscuits are named after political figures: Bourbon, Garibaldi, Jaffa the Cake… Does the jewel in the crown of that lost eastern European empire need the same biscuity immortality? Is the exchange of such things as gifts at Christmastide some kind of hidden message?

I give you this presentation assortment on the understanding that one day, someone will present themselves to you, with an all-butter Viennese swirl concealed about their person and they will request a favour of you that you must not refuse. This day may never come, but if it does, you must act swiftly and unquestioningly so that the glory that is Vienna shall rise once more to its rightful place as the supreme power in this region of the world. Do people not speak in similar hushed tones of the Cakes of Eccles, Dundee or Chorley? We know of the Florentine, but where, of where, is the biscuit known as the Warsaw or the Cleethorpes?

The image has gone, only you and I… It means nothing to me… This means nothing to me…

Oh Vienna!

I FELT THAT...

You know, it was all going so well. I’d been through four drafts of a nice new two metre high piece of artwork and the various tinkerings and modifications were getting narrowed down to something that seemed to be working. I had given my advice on certain matters of marketing which had been mulled over and taken on board, even though some of them had ultimately been rejected. Equally, some of the suggestions coming back to me had seemed perfectly valid, so I saved off a low resolution jpeg of the final artwork with one further question attached as to a matter of the content, bundled the whole lot into an email and hit “reply” (We have to consider such things, you know, we artists in the digital age – it’s not all just “colouring in” you know…).

But then I noticed that I’d not hit “reply”, I’d hit “reply all”…

Stupid, stupid, stupid!!!

An entire committee of mysterious people who were not the people I had been dealing with at that point and, in my mind at least, were not the people who I had been doing this unpaid favour for, were listed on the original email and suddenly they were all about to get a copy of my lovingly (and, I might add thoroughly professionally) crafted artwork.

Damn and indeed blast!

Sure enough, within the hour I had some feedback. Thoroughly unwarranted feedback based upon only the slimmest amount of actual knowledge, and which seemed to have no knowledge whatsoever of the development time spent creating a consistent style (or “corporate identity”) over several variants which I had been trying to achieve across the various artwork items I had been producing for them in my free time over several recent weeks, but nevertheless feedback it was. This was from someone who, apparently, runs a professional cleaning company and who, it seemed, just felt like sticking their oar in. Strangely, I would never email someone who ran a professional cleaning company and tell them what I “reckoned” about how to go about cleaning things, I’d just assume that they would know what they are doing, but, because it’s artwork we’re talking about, apparently everyone’s an expert, and, also apparently, the professional artist doesn’t have the faintest clue about what he’s doing because everyone else always knows better when it comes to something visual.

How does the old saying go? “Opinions are like ar**holes, everybody has one…”

“I feel that it is difficult to read the small text at the bottom. (It) need(s) to be bigger/clearer/bolder. (It’s) lost with the colours, etc.” (I’ve corrected the text - we have to consider such things, you know, we artists in the digital age – it’s not all just “colouring in” you know…). You feel that…? I certainly felt it. Right between the shoulder blades.

Given that all that they had seen was a very low resolution image of a piece of artwork 25% of actual size, sent through at a size guaranteed to be both basically legible for content and proof-checking but small enough not to slam into too many firewalls and server file size limits (we have to consider such things, you know, we artists in the digital age – it’s not all just “colouring in” you know…), why he felt qualified enough to be compelled to comment rather flabbergasted me. Actually, it didn’t. It just really, really bloody well annoyed me. “This is precisely why I stopped doing this kind of thing for people”, I found myself thinking as I suddenly remembered all those bitter memories of so many years ago which came flooding back to remind me why I got the hell out of there in the first place.

The other problem is that he might well be right. I just happen not to think so. That’s the problem with artwork, there isn’t a particularly “right” answer. You just have to trust your instincts and I happen to trust mine more, that’s all. Plus, if you’re not overly familiar with these things, you really, really need to see the whole thing printed full size before messing around with the design. So many times I’ve changed things on screen for people only to have to change them back when the print turns up. That’s why we call it a “design instinct”, I suppose. Sometimes you really do just know when something feels right.

I remember the story about Michelangelo and the statue of David when one of the Cardinals said that he thought the nose was too big. Up the ladder with his hammer and chisel and a handful of marble dust sped old Mickey, and, tapping his hammer and chisel together, he sprinkled down the dust onto the Cardinals and came back down again. “That’s much better!” said the Cardinal and went happily off on his way. I don’t know whether that’s a true story, but I do rather hope that it is.

Of course, I’ve seen this all before. When I worked in the late, lamented small ads game, every Tom, Dick and Harry seemed to think that they knew better, and would buy the tiniest advertising space of about 60mm square and insist on trying to cram a small novel’s worth of text into it and then demand that every single element was big and bold, and it usually turned out to be my fault that I couldn’t change the laws of physics and make it happen for them. (We have to consider such things, you know, we artists in the digital age – it’s not all just “colouring in” you know…).

Equally, in my later career spent in a room full of engineers, software designers, directors and other “creatives” so far up themselves that it was almost unbelievable, I was unlikely to stroll over to a workstation and comment snidely upon a bit of dodgy looking coding or a particularly pathetically-worded half-completed powerpoint presentation, but everyone felt that it was perfectly fine to come over and tell you how rubbish they thought your latest artwork was. It’s the visual arts, you see. Everyone has a pair of eyes, so everyone thinks they know what they’re talking about, and any professional decisions made by a graphic artist are obviously, by default completely wrong when faced with such wisdom from those untrained in such things.

Conversely, when presented with something that looks utterly pathetic that some idiot has knocked up on their PC, it is apparently bad form for the professional artist to be snotty about it because you will then be told that “it does the job” and people will go away from you feeling annoyed and upset that you haven’t compared their party invite to a work by Leonardo da Vinci, convinced that the artist’s “trained eye” is a myth, and fully subscribing to the “it’ll do” culture…

Anyway, I composed a furious email consisting of (basically) the words “You’re” “Wrong”, “no”, “again” and “wrong” rearranged into a suitably dismissive order and repeated as often as seemed necessary, and then I deleted that and composed another email instead and, because I was feeling slightly less petulant than I ought to have been, I deleted all references in this new message alluding to “myopic morons”, “no good turn going unpunished” and “obviously not knowing what I was doing”, deciding that I could save them for the blog later where nobody was likely to read them. After all, it is always wise to have a certain amount of tact and diplomacy in your dealings with people. (We have to consider such things, you know, we artists in the digital age – it’s not all just “colouring in” you know…).

I then cropped the offending area and saved it as a jpeg file and attached it to the email and sent it through at full size just to show them that I really didn’t think that it was going to be a problem. I wasn’t convinced that anyone would believe me, after all, when you’ve only got all those years of experience to fall back on, what do you actually know? Sadly, I will no doubt end up feeling compelled to change it to the kind of hideous chunky font that should only ever be put on a home-made party invite.

Look, I know that doing someone a favour should never an excuse to produce something substandard, but I’d like to think that people might just give the people they ask to do these things just the slightest amount of credit for knowing what they are doing and a little bit of appreciation for the fact that they are doing it at all. Happily, the people that I was actually doing that particular favour for are lovely enough that I really, really would never want to let them down, but as for the rest of them, well, there’s a particular circle of hell reserved especially for them which, unfortunately, I don’t believe in…

Damn!!!

Still, I do feel a lot better for getting that out of my system. I know, I know. I’m such an ungrateful wretch and I can’t take a bit of criticism. I’m dreadful, I know that I am, but you’re not going to change me now, well, not unless it’s for the worse, anyway…

The attached file I sent through was called “FFS”, by the way: “Free - Full Size” (honest!).

NO GOOD TURN GOES UNPUNISHED

Some of you might remember a little piece I wrote about a week ago about a little artwork favour I knocked up as a favour for an old friend and that I commented half-jokingly at the time about “no good turn going unpunished” and we all moved on with our lives with a surprising number of people in Denmark showing a little bit more interest than is usual for one of my stark little pieces.

Well, as predicted, the saga did indeed continue.

Now, right from the off I need to state quite clearly to anyone reading this, especially those who made the requests, that I really didn’t mind and I actually quite enjoyed doing it. In fact, because I really wouldn’t want to upset anyone I’m going to write that again, in bold italics, just so you know.

I really didn’t mind and I actually quite enjoyed doing it.

As an “artist”, even one with as limited a skill set as I regularly demonstrate, you are always stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand you want the images you produce to “look good” (or at least as good as they can), but on the other hand you are always very conscious of how little the “not-we” folk of the great wide non-artworking world understand the process.

Let me try to explain. Many, many years ago I used to work in the small ads game, and a lot of those adverts were very tall and very thin. If you ran a company called something like “McGillicuddy’s Metal Mice” (not – as far as I know – a real company…) you might have a logo that was made up of three chunky letter Ms, and your company name next to it in a nice chunky typeface, (and also, quite possibly, a picture of a mouse) and you would quite reasonably ask for this to appear nice and big at the top of your advert so that everyone could see your name leap off the page. So far, so good. The artist could put the 3Ms at the top, nice and big, and split the three words onto three lines and they would all appear in a nice chunky way at the top of the advert, drop the mouse picture underneath that  and everyone would be happy.

Or so you would think…

Mr McGillicuddy might, however, have paid a gullible teenager to create his letterhead for him in an exquisitely fine and delicate font that beautifully topped off all the letters and bills he sent out, but which was all on one line spread across the full 210mm width of  his paperwork. Why, he might well ask of the unfortunate salesperson presenting the draft artwork, does this fine, delicate and ultimately very wide artwork not appear big and bold and huge and heavy and in the same format as all his business stationery across the 55mm span of his trade advert? Trying to explain width and proportion and scale, and how if you reduce the width, you also reduce the height, and how the letters get naturally thinner the smaller they are is almost impossible to do under those circumstances.

Exit one unhappy customer.

But then this lack of understanding of visual space and shape always comes as a surprise to those to whom it is blindingly obvious. Say, for example, I created a decorative border for a business card that included a nice bit of simple celtic knotwork. Another customer might come along and say that they liked the celtic knotwork on Bob’s business card, and can they have something similar. So, you go away and spend quite some time creating some new and completely different celtic design for the border (and it is surprisingly complicated to do something that came so easily to the craftsmen of 1000 years ago on an electronically and mathematically precise screen), and you will present it to them and they will (hopefully) say that they like it. More often than not they will ask you to change the border though, because it’s the same as Bob’s, even though it isn’t. Sometimes, even if you show them and put the two distinctly different pieces next to each other, they still can’t see it, which is where it starts to get really confusing to the more artistically aware. The customer being always right can be a right so-and-so when they’re being so palpably wrong.

This can get even worse when you try to explain the subtle art of using space. How can you possibly ever get across to the “not-we” that strangely instinctive process by which you can move around various page elements until you get the sizes and shapes into a position that, ultimately, just seems “right”...? There’s no real science to it, you just know, just as easily as you can instinctively see when it seems wrong, or untidy or a bit scrappy.

So how does this all relate to the “quick flyer” I knocked up on that evening a week ago? Well, an immediate question was asked of my rectangular half A4 landscape artwork as to whether it could be used as a poster as well by stretching it. My artistic spacial awareness “spider sense” tingled and bristled and I resized the elements to an A4 portrait format. This was tweaked a little for content, as expected, and very flattering (we arty types do like a bit of flattery every now and again) reports came back that people were pleased with it and so forth. Then someone mentioned that they might want a larger version for attaching to lamp-posts and so on, which, I explained would be fine. The artwork could easily double in size because, at the resolution I’d done it, if the artwork was being viewed from a distance, the eye can play beautiful tricks and “clean up” any blurring that might occur.

Then someone mentioned a banner… then a different kind of banner. Suddenly my scrappy little scribblings, hastily knocked out for a little A4 poster were going to have to be blown up into high resolution artwork six feet high. This might very well have stretched the limits of the pixels in my original images far beyond their limits, but I sat down last night and reworked the image up to the required sizes and sent them off, hoping that everyone would be happy. Those pixels might still look a bit dodgy, and I am rather fretting about this, but there are limits to what you can do.

So, apart from the hours of extra work done with my usual good grace, why am I saying that my good turn has found itself being punished? It was two things really. Firstly, the upload site I used to send the artwork mysteriously chose the very night I needed to use it to reduce its upload limits by 50%, a strange thing to do in an age when image sizes are getting larger. This left me having to resize the artwork again in the late evening, and still might turn out to make those pesky little pixels re-approximate themselves which might undo all the work I did in resizing them up and make the whole thing end up looking completely rubbish. Secondly, I had a look at the website and found my handbill flyer there in all its glory advertising the very event, and it didn’t half look scrappy against the sleek, minimalist, custom-designed photographic imagery which was advertising the other upcoming plays, and I felt like a right talentless hack again.

I know, I know. It wasn’t designed for that particular purpose and so it was bound to look a little out of place, and someone who has created an image can always see all the faults where others only see just another image, but it still made me cringe to see it there and now I feel slightly ashamed of it.

You see? I can sit here and talk all this fine talk about design and aesthetics, but in the end, nobody really knows anything, and an innocent, casually made remark that once cut me to the quick when I criticised a dodgy looking bit of artwork someone once proudly showed me: “But there’s nothing wrong with it. It does the job…” jumped back into my mind and throttled all the reason out of me today. “It’ll do!” really shouldn’t be the best we aim for, but it seems to work for most of the time.


(By the way, there's a new LB Tabloid posting up today, if you fancy it...)