I was recently asked to write a profile piece for another blog describing my work history, a 'how I got here' type of thing. Its been a long road, my memory is hazy but I think my facts are fairly accurate.
The following is the the piece I submitted...
Born in Bavaria, January 1971 to Hungarian and Nepalese parents, I am the youngest of 10 children – and the only male. My summers were spent chasing mountain goats for their skin, we would make hats and shoes to sell to the villagers. My father was a cat farrier, he made the finest feline saddlery north of Nordendorf but had to retire early due to the tin shortage, shoeing cats in anything else proved near fatal and the business suffered. My mother drank.
Aged 8 I was sent away to board at the Sorbonne due to my natural multi-linguistic abilities, the acquisition of which to this day have yet to be explained. My academic study suffered though, due to the confusion surrounding my attire. Having 9 sisters coupled with the family’s poor income, hand me down clothes were all that was on offer, it took two years before I was fully accepted in Boys Jousting class and Chauvinistic Studies were a no-go. It was here however, during many solitary moments hiding in the bell tower, that my artistic flair took hold and design of all things started to appeal. I decided to run away and join a traveling art show. We would caravan from town to town pitching up on village greens offering art and design of all kinds, from simple business cards and flyers to magazines and brochures, marker pen caricatures on cereal boxes to sliced sharks in aspic - we covered it all and upon completion of my 4 year apprenticeship I headed out to make my way on my own terms.
My first paid job was as a black and white scanner operator, which is not the operator of a scanner that has been painted in black and white as I originally thought but a scanner which would only scan objects that were either black or white – oddly the scanner itself was painted a myriad of colours. This soon became quite tedious and I became quite jealous of the colour scanner operators who operated black and white painted machines, they were capable of scanning every colour known to man! I took a job there. This lead me on to platemaking – again not what you might expect, no ceramics involved at all - and from there on to manual planning, a process so time consuming, expensive and painstakingly precise it would take 9 weeks to produce a monthly magazine, just impractical. The trade needed a revolution and it came in the form of an oatmeal coloured plastic box called a Quadra – I assume it was called such because it could do 4 things, I only discovered one, DTP. This was a new form of etheral witchcraft whereby magazine pages could be created, edited and styled so quickly inside the Quadra it seemed impossible yet completely obvious. Some of my weaker souled contemporaries refused to accept this new God and held onto their Swann Morton handles and rubylith so tight the only safe thing to do was put them in the darkroom, seal the door and hope they would eventually see the light (unlikely given the nature of the room but I never went back to check).
DTP truly was a beam of Godly light to my frustrated braintank, which while revelatory and welcome, burned the hair from my skull in a circular pattern. Suddenly, the creativity in my head that I had been struggling to realise was possible and very soon magazine page production became jaded, I craved the adoration and adulation the older members of the traveling art show received, I buried myself in books, even reading some. I studied fine art taking cues from the greats, Ditko, Shultz and both Hannah & Barbera. I also became obsessed with packaging design and logos so much so that at one point I decorated my entire house with the wrapper from every item in the Happy Shopper ‘basics’ range.
I have been a journeyman in design for over 20 years now and still learn new things daily – for instance, today I learned there are fonts other than Helvetica. Amazing! I love my job, I do what comes easily to me and get to create things all day long. I imagine, plan, attempt, plan again and produce. The final pay off is to see the thing that was once only visible in my mind's eye realised in physical form.
A long way from chasing goats up mountains.
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