I remember Paul Gorman saying of Barney Bubbles, just shortly after his book about the graphic designer, Reasons To Be Cheerful, had been published, that he was the ‘gift that keeps on giving’. Gorman, apparently, kept getting sent things people thought Bubbles may have designed that didn’t make it into the first edition of theContinue reading “Meeting Bob Linney”
Category Archives: Graphic Design
Finding Jacky Linney… and Tony
Two years ago I wrote about Bob Linney, opening with: “I didn’t think I knew Bob Linney. It turns out though that I did—he was the mysterious designer behind a print that had been hanging in our house for some time. Bought by my wife from an antiques centre several years ago… I’ve been staringContinue reading “Finding Jacky Linney… and Tony”
Graphic commons: A memory drift
Date: 18.05.2025Distance: 4 milesSteps: 9150Start: 11:50Ground covered: Town centre and feeder streets It’s been a while. Four hours to kill in the East Midlands gave me time to visit a town I lived in for five years in the 1980s, exactly 40 years ago. The intention wasn’t nostalgia, but that naturally occurred as memories jarredContinue reading “Graphic commons: A memory drift”
Too much pressure: 2 Tone and typography
My introduction to graphic design was staring up at a Beatles poster on my bedroom wall aged 8, wondering why the vertical stroke of the T dropped below the baseline of the band’s name. I had no understanding that what I was pondering was actually called typography, nor that the words graphic and design existed.Continue reading “Too much pressure: 2 Tone and typography”
Ultra-processed graphics
When colleagues bought me Chris van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People as a recovery read while I was off work recently, I didn’t expect a book about food to have so many of its pages dedicated to graphic design. But alongside advertising and marketing, visual communication is mentioned enough times for me to liberally tab many of its pagesContinue reading “Ultra-processed graphics”
Nostalgia aid
This month, Just For One Day: The Live Aid Musical, opens at The Old Vic in London. While in 1985 the focus of the original Live Aid was all about raising money for famine-struck Ethiopia, despite Just For One Day giving 10% of all profits to The Band Aid Charitable Trust, nostalgia appears to beContinue reading “Nostalgia aid”
Finding Bob Linney
I didn’t think I knew Bob Linney. It turns out though that I did—he was the mysterious designer behind a print that had been hanging in our house for some time. Bought by my wife from an antiques centre several years ago, his London Brass poster had hung on our landing wall until, on movingContinue reading “Finding Bob Linney”
Resituating Gee Vaucher
In 2016 I started a review of Gee Vaucher’s Introspective exhibition by saying: “…[as] a teenage punk in the early 1980s it would have seemed inconceivable that Gee Vaucher’s artwork might ever grace the walls of a gallery…”. In 2023, the same thought crosses my mind about what ‘teenage me’ would have made of Vaucher’s life andContinue reading “Resituating Gee Vaucher”
Design Twitter
This post is delayed—I was planning to commemorate 10 years of being on Twitter back in July, but other things got in the way. However, with the furore around Elon Musk’s buy-out of the site, it seems pertinent to write about Twitter now, especially as many people I follow are starting to flee the platformContinue reading “Design Twitter”
Apostrophizing
As we were finishing off writing the panel text for our forthcoming Picture Books For All exhibition about the Ipswich printer W. S. Cowell Ltd, Rob Ramsden, Vassiliki Tzomaka and I had an interesting debate around whether to apostrophize their name or not. Colloquially known as Cowells, we questioned whether this should be written asContinue reading “Apostrophizing”
Nigel Ball 