THE QUICK FLYER ROUND

Yesterday I sacrificed my usual blogging time in order to do a favour for a friend. I’m not mentioning this so that you will think any more of me (although Christ knows there’s a very long and steep climb that needs to be done there…), in fact I’m not really quite sure yet as to why I feel the need to talk about this at all at this precise moment, other than that I’ve just reminded myself about the old saying about no good deed going unpunished and maybe I’m trying to get ahead of that particular nightmare. Possibly it was that I just felt the need to explain any shortcomings in the following text as it unfolds from my head via a keyboard and ultimately into your minds this morning. You see, my whole writing routine got rather hijacked – no, actually, that’s much too hard a word for it… let’s just say sidelined - yesterday by a small request for a favour which suddenly grew into a little project for me to work on and then evolved into a battle to get the old computing equipment to work properly. As ever, these things are seldom as straightforward as you may hope when you sit down with limited time available and very few ideas rattling around in your head.

I very rarely get personal emails any more. To be honest I never really did. I have a small (but highly select) band of chums with whom I stay in contact every once in a blue moon and that seems to keep my life ticking along in the slightly dreary manner with which you are now becoming semi-regularly acquainted. Suffice it to say that every once in a while I will get a personal communication and, after having bounced around the room with a certain amount of glee at the mere fact of having been remembered by anyone at all, I will read the message and, with rather more haste than seems necessary (and which probably smacks rather too much of unhealthy desperation…) I will probably reply to it and then spend the intervening couple of years before getting another reply wondering quite what it was that I wrote which was so utterly terrible and hideous in thought and content that it frightened my communicant away. Once those two years have passed and everything is forgotten, then the next exchange will occur and the pattern will be repeated.

Probably.

At least we can now estimate that there are now possibly half a dozen times remaining in our brief spans until one or the other of us turns up our toes and this sorry farce will be concluded forever.

Anyway, to cut a long (and mostly exaggerated) story mercifully short, I received an email asking me if I could knock out a quick flyer for a play that’s going to be performed at the end of July. “No problem” thought I, this being just the sort of thing I sometimes actually enjoy doing to keep the rusty old cogs of the brain from seizing up entirely. The message itself had come in about ten o’clock at night but I’d not actually seen it until the following morning, but I guessed that there was a certain amount of urgency to it and so I thought I’d better do something. Not that the ideas were flowing yet, but I thought I’d better at least acknowledge the message and replied saying that I had no problem in doing the thing, but it might be a few days before I had enough free time. As ever, I over-estimated hugely the time needed to do these things when you actually put your mind to it and start to get on with things. If you’ve ever wondered why I turn up so very early, it’s usually because I tend to allow for anything up to an hour extra onto any journey time because I believe such things always take much, much longer than they ever do. Unless of course the journey actually does take forever, then all those wasted hours are suddenly vindicated.

So anyway, I had a bit of a notion that some sort of sub-Quentin Blake style illustration might be an effective way of handling this little project, and so I grabbed my pens and pencils and set about scribbling one of those second-rate daubs, much like the ones that I used to do, which does go a long, long way towards explaining the singular lack of success I had as a freelancer back in the day. Truth be told, I do so much of my work on the computer these days that I’m really very, very out of practice with the whole process of drawing that it was rather nice just to have the opportunity to try something out that (probably) wouldn’t mean a big shouting at when it was finished. I still find it hard to believe nowadays that I used to draw for fun when I was a child.

Somehow, in and around breakfast and the run to the station, one of my childlike daubs was completed to a barely satisfactory standard, and I headed upstairs with my usual blogging hour still available before the employment clock would need to start clicking. I launched the scanner and for some reason that it took me an absolute age to get to the bottom of, it wouldn’t scan the whole image and so my “Stressed Eric” vein started to pulse as I tried to figure it out. Oddly enough, within ten minutes, probably more than fifty percent of which was spent irrationally bellowing “Why are you doing this?” at an inanimate object that would never answer, I had my scan and I set about quickly colouring it in using a very “loose” style, before setting about composing the type that I was going to use.

After that, all the elements came together surprisingly quickly, hardly any time at all in fact, thanks to some rinky-dinky software that can make my pathetic notions seem a tad more exciting than they might otherwise appear, and I was able to zap the image off to where it was needed for the usual list of tweaks and amendments that will no doubt be needed. Oddly, what I produced was something that fundamentally probably still resembles one of those adverts I used to do when I worked in the small ads business. It still surprises me how much that we fall back on what we used to know and the basics that we first learned no matter how far we move away from these things. I guess the fundamentals remain the same no matter what you do.

I was tutored by a lecturer once who theorised that everyone’s personal dress sense tends to generally freeze at what you’re wearing when you’re about eighteen, and that all the clothes you buy after that will basically be slight variations upon whatever that is. I suspect that was probably not actually true for any of you, but I think I know what he was driving at, and I’m beginning to suspect that it’s much the same for those of us who consider ourselves to be designers, however loosely the term might be applied; we tend to fall back on what we first learned, and whatever was considered “good” design when we were learning our trade is the benchmark by which we judge any artwork we produce, no matter how much (or – in my case at least - little) we develop from that point.

So, why am I telling you all this today? Well, to be honest, I’m still not entirely sure. I suppose that I’ve been becoming increasingly aware that I don’t really write enough about what’s going on in my life but instead tend to burble on about things that really have little bearing on the day to day occurrences here in Lesser Blogfordshire, so, for once, I thought I might just tell you something that actually happened to me instead.

Anyway, the first version of the flyer is attached. I’m sure those of you still in the business of proper graphic design will be trying to stifle your giggles at the ineptitude of my humble efforts, just as I’m sure that the final piece won’t resemble this at all. In the meantime, if you aren’t going to be doing anything else on those particular dates, there’s a theatre show going on in Stockport that some very good friends of mine are involved in, and I’m sure they would appreciate you being there.