davidthedesigner

another day, another tube strike

You may well think that this blog is dead. But it's not: it's merely resting. Just waiting for the right moment to return with a vengeance. Although that might not be for some time yet. I'll keep you posted though – you can be sure of that.

But meanwhile life goes on. And it might surprise you that I've been having some very interesting chats with designer friends. Virtual friends that I've met on here: albeit friends that I've never met. Perhaps one day I will.

Anyway, one of those chats involved my giving some advice. I'm always happy to do that, if you ask me nicely. But I don't force it down people's throats. God forbid that I should ever turn into one of those "you don't want to do it like that, you want to do it like this" fellows. There's enough of them already. Particularly among designers (or, should I say, a certain type of designer). I'm sure you've met them, too.

But back to the advice, which was this: when you first become self-employed (and if you're a designer, you almost certainly will, one day, become self-employed) the best advice that I can give you is to always follow your first instinct. That's about the people you meet and the work that you'll be asked to take on. That is, if it feels right go for it; but if it doesn't, proceed with caution.

It was advice that was given to me on my very first day as a solo artist. And it's always stood me in good stead throughout my career. I'd like to say that it never failed me, but that wouldn't quite be correct. Sometimes something happens, something that you couldn't have foreseen. Something that is beyond your control, and which spirals towards disaster.

So let me take you back to 1984. A time when you might well find me listening to:

Simple Minds (well, somebody had to).

I was working in Covent Garden (OK: on the fringes of) at workplace number 6. Alongside some very talented and like-minded folk. Good times and happy days. The office had two secretaries: for it was a job share (yes, we were ahead of the times). Now the afternoon secretary did a morning shift at an architectural practice based in Chelsea, and come early 1984 they were in need of a freelance graphic designer to help them out on a particular project. Would I be interested? Damn right I'd be interested.

So arrangements were made and an appointement set: I would meet one of the partners who would sound me out and tell me all about their requirements. The date: 28 March 1984.

But this was the Thatcher era, remember. Turbulent times. And on 28 March 1984 there was a London Transport strike. So, no tube trains and virtually no buses anywhere in London. But I was lucky, I managed to hail a cab in Shaftesbury Avenue that delivered me straight to Chelsea for my 2pm appointment.

And so I met one of the partners, Peter N. A nice chap, and we had a lovely chat. Mostly about the narrow boat that he'd bought and fully restored somewhere in the Midlands. We seemed to get on well and the job was outlined to me: designing the display panels for a new UNESCO-funded museum in the Middle East. Fantastic, I thought. So it was a yes from me, and a yes from Peter N. Terms were discussed and agreed, and we arranged that I should start work in two or three weeks time. We'd keep in touch by phone and arrange the exact date once other team members had been consulted.

And so it was that I found myself back on the streets of Chelsea. Mid-afternoon on the day of a transport strike. Not a free cab to be found anywhere. And to top it off, it had started raining.

What a long and miserable trudge back to Covent Garden that was, I can tell you. And I should have realised that that was the omen. But I didn't.

To be continued...

browned off (or things in life that i completely fail to understand #9)

I don't know about you, but I've begun to notice that brown cars are beginning to make their presence known on the highways and byways. Well, I say brown, but more usually the colour might better be described as sludge. In various shades of, depending upon the manufacturer.

Now each to their own and all that. And I admit men do reach a certain age (let's just say that it's when we're past our procreational best) when we answer the call of corduroy in just such a colour. In trousers mostly, although the designers amongst us would prefer to go the whole hog and we hanker after a suit. Preferably from Old Town.

But to choose to have your car that colour – that's altogether on another scale, isn't it? Now I know from recent experience that manufacturers only offer a very limited range of colour options these days, and that not all of us want the liability of pristine white or the anonymity of silver. But it completely mystefies me why anyone should go into a car showroom and think "that model would look so much better if it were the colour of diarrhea".

So, if you should be so tempted, I'm here to remind you that brown cars (and all shades thereof) were a bad idea the first time round:

Don't let that salesman persuade you otherwise.

one hundred and one uses for an ampersand #1

© Jamie Oliver 2013.

this made me smile #201

The Parmesan Pencil.

i'm breaking this silence...

...to bang another drum (and if you're a designer you should read it).

happy new year

A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,

And I, like a second-comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,

And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,

And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,

And stooped and drank a little more,

Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth

On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.

The voice of my education said to me

He must be killed,

For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, if you were a man

You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,

How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough

And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,

Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him?

Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him?

Was it humility, to feel so honoured?

I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:

If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid,

But even so, honoured still more

That he should seek my hospitality

From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough

And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,

And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,

Seeming to lick his lips,

And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,

And slowly turned his head,

And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,

Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round

And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,

And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,

A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,

Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,

Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,

I picked up a clumsy log

And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,

But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste,

Writhed like lightning, and was gone

Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,

At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.

I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!

I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,

And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords

Of life.

And I have something to expiate:

A pettiness.

 

D.H. Lawrence, Taormina, 1923

award winning contractors

Hey Mr Builder: that doesn't quite ring true, does it?

this made me smile #200*

Type City by Hong Seon Jang.

*200 smiles - that has to be worth celebrating!

this made me smile #199

I'm loving the work of Belgian photographer Bert Danckaert (via Tim George).

way to go

I popped into the Pitt Rivers Museum yesterday (as one does) and was rather taken by this Ghanaian coffin for a shopkeeper.