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Silkscreen, stencils and the world cup

In the summer of 1966 I heard that a silkscreen printer who specialised in producing the ‘flags’ that estate agents place outside houses for sale, had suffered a major fire. Racks full of stencils repeatedly washed with white spirit, drums of solvent based inks and...

Printmaking, posters and Eckersley

Two facets of the graphics course had captured my imagination: the first was printmaking, and the second was typography. Printmaking had a hybrid character, both fine art and commercial graphics influences ran through it. In the sixties, Warhol, Lichtenstein and many...

First struggles with type and typography.

Design education – the delights and tribulations of typography A key subject in the curriculum, and one that was to become particularly important to me, was typography. In the days before computers and desktop publishing, all text had to be set in type – either...

Armin Hofmann – another influential name

Serendipity led me to stumble over one of the most influential designers and educators of the ‘Swiss’ school. My intake at college was the product of what was known as ‘The Bulge’ (later called ‘Babyboomers’) – the children of soldiers recently returned...

Design and designers – getting to know the names.

Every discipline has its own language and its own narrative. And stories need heroes. Part of getting to grips with design lay in understanding the history and the key players. Slowly my awareness of the output of graphic designers was growing. There were exhibitions...

Product design or graphic design?

When you know little about design, important choices such as whether to pursue graphic or product design may be made for the the most ill-informed reasons. In the early months of my course I still had a muddled vision of where I was going, though I was influenced as...

Heaven and helvetica

It is hard to believe today, but there was a time when Helvetica was a rare and costly resource. In my early graphic design studies, I was impressed by the work of Swiss and German typographers and one thing that seemed to characterise them was a cool and distinctive...

Design in the sixties.

The public face of design in the mid 60’s was very much that of product design. In 1944, the Council of Industrial Design had been founded by Hugh Dalton, and in 1956 the first Design Centre opened in Haymarket, London, followed a few years later by the Manchester...

The art student’s first day.

Cigarettes, strangeness and the opposite sex. A little over an hour after completing the administrative formalities we found ourselves in the St Phillip’s annex, a Victorian school building three quarters of a mile from the main college. This was the home to the...