Writing

Meeting Bob Linney

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 the book, and that Gorman hadn’t uncovered in all the research he had conducted. I feel the same is true of Bob Linney, that he is the ‘gift that keeps on giving’, although for very different reasons—every time I visit his widow Jacky to help with…

07/12/202507/12/2025

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 staring at it over breakfast ever since. Unsigned, I was intrigued who had designed the poster, and despite many Google search terms, I couldn’t find out… That was until two weeks ago in a bittersweet moment of discovery and loss when I read Bob Linney’s obituary in The…

18/10/202519/10/2025

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 jarred and the distance of time brought personal questions about imagined realities. Mansfield was not an overly poor town 40 years ago, but it was a stridently working class one. Mining unions had, rightly, won relatively good pay for the dangerous job of being a miner—the…

07/06/202507/06/2025

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. Nevertheless, it sparked an interest in why certain decisions were made about how things looked. Later, between the ages of 11 and 13, I became fascinated with 2 Tone bands and their visual form. At middle school, playground tribes would write band names on their…

16/02/202516/02/2025

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 pages and take notes as I read. Ultra-Processed People is about Ultra-Processed Food, (UPF), defined by Van Tulleken as ingredients in processed food that you wouldn’t have in your kitchen. Subtitled Why do we all eat stuff that isn’t food…and why can’t we stop?, big claims are made from the…

13/05/202413/05/2024

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 be the real motivating force in 2024. The Old Vic website states the show captures, “…one moment [that] made the world stand still and brought 1.5 billion people together – and they all have a story to tell about ‘the day rock ‘n’ roll changed the…

21/01/2024

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 moving 3 years ago, it was given a more prominent position in our new dining room. I’ve been staring at it over breakfast ever since. Unsigned, I was intrigued who had designed the poster, and despite many Google search terms such as ‘London Brass’, Arts Council…

13/07/202304/08/2023

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 and work being the subject of an academic text. As I concluded then, 2016 was the perfect time for a retrospective exhibition, given that Donald Trump’s election victory was announced 10 days before Introspective’s private view, and with Vaucher’s artwork of the Statue of Liberty with her…

12/03/202312/03/2023

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 as Cowell’s. That different writers had used both versions didn’t help with our decision, and neither did the fact that Cowells were particularly bad at using apostrophes themselves. Buried in a book or on a blog post of our own writing, getting it wrong might be…

18/09/202225/11/2022

Picture books for all: the journey of an exhibition

Nearly 3 years ago, when staring out of the window of a staff room at the University of Suffolk and watching Suffolk Archives’ new headquarters be built right next door to us, my colleague Rob Ramsden and I ruminated on what the archive of W.S. Cowell Ltd might have in it. That this archive would soon be our neighbour was a tantalising thought. For the uninitiated, Cowells, as they are more often referred to, was an Ipswich based printers that helped to develop the market for picture books in Britain by printing the first UK edition of Babar the Elephant.…

19/06/202225/11/2022

Creative logo process

It is always rewarding when a graduate student gets in contact to let you know what they have been up to, and it is even more rewarding when they ask for input into a project. I knew Elliott Hefford, who graduated from University of Suffolk in 2015, had done well for himself; landing a secure junior design role straight out of the course, pretty much as he packed up his end of year show. I had watched with interest as he progressed to middleweight and then senior designer, before going freelance in 2020. The work he was posting on Instagram…

22/01/202219/06/2022

Graphic commons: make do and mend

Getting out and about in recent weeks has bought a renewed attention on my part to the graphic commons, and in particular, road markings. I noticed a few ‘make do and mend’ type repairs to road markings over the last year on some of my constitutionals, but their prevalence has only really struck me recently. I assumed, wrongly, that these were simply bodged jobs by one or two contractors, but apparently not. They are everywhere, in Ipswich at least. These occur where there have been road works and the contractors hired to dig up the road only repaint existing markings…

26/09/202126/09/2021

New old content

I am pleased to be able to add links to pdfs of two of my previously out-of-print publications to this website. My first foray into publishing took the form of a self-published photobook and essay titled McJunk in 2011. This documented an eight year obsession of photographing McDonald’s litter when ever I came across it. What started out as a personal observational project, turned into a critique of the relationship between graphic design and disposable culture. I can trace much of my current research practice from this publication, and despite there being many things about it I would change now,…

14/07/202114/07/2021

Notes on a no show—12 months on

12 months ago, on 11 June 2020, I wrote the words below on my iPhone on the occasion of not being able to have an End of Year Show exhibition of student Graphic Design and Illustration work due to the Covid-19 lockdown. I left the words sitting on my phone, not quite able to publish them. One year on, and I have similar feelings, but at least this year I am able to celebrate with a few students who are in Ipswich and colleagues who can make it along to a small socially distanced and heavily sanitised gathering outside the…

23/06/202123/06/2021

Repetition repetition repetition

After a tutorial with a student who spoke of having what they thought might be RSI last year, I decided to deliver a lecture on the subject. It isn’t untypical for students to start to develop RSI symptoms in their final year of study, as they cram for their dissertations and towards their last assignments. However, after listening to this student it struck me that 2020/21 being what is was, with far more students studying from home or halls, without having the breaks of coming into sessions on campus, it was likely that the number of undergraduates RSI may affect…

20/06/202120/06/2021

In a de boomtown

Almost 40 years ago to the day, Ghost Town by The Specials was released. It came at a time when uprisings were tearing through Brixton and other major towns and cities in Britain. At the time, watching the video for the single on TV as it went to Number 1 in the charts, with the lead item on all news bulletins being of fighting between inner city youth and the police with burning cars and buildings as the visual backdrop, Ghost Town seemed prescient and to aurally depict the tension of the streets. The video, directed by graphic designer Barney…

06/06/202106/06/2021

And the answer is…

On Monday evening I went to an online design talk, and for the first time ever of attending such things, the organiser put us into break-out groups for 5 minutes at the start. I wasn’t quite sure why this was happening, and couldn’t see a connection to the talk, but I went with it. In groups of 4 or 5 we were tasked with discussing ‘what is good design?’ It was interesting to hear what some of the others in my break-out had to say, and there was plenty of chat about aesthetics, with one person stating good design was…

28/04/202129/04/2021

Virtually speaking, part 2

Today at 12 noon I watched a talk by Malcolm Garrett, the graphic designer famous for his work with Buzzcocks, Magazine and Duran Duran, amongst many others. Hosted by designer Patrick Thomas under the title Icons, this was part of a series of online talks held on Saturdays for art and design students during the current worldwide coronavirus lockdowns. It was an amazing talk and I got to hear many of the stories behind record sleeves I know intimately. Both Thomas and Garrett were generous with their time—scheduled for 45 minutes, I bailed out needing some lunch at the 2…

13/03/202113/03/2021

Griffics—Play for today

Past the age of 13, what does the word ‘play’ mean to most people? As a teenager advancing towards adulthood, there is the temptation to reject the word, seeing play as too childish as one desperately tries to appear ‘grown-up’. For many adults, I suspect, the word remains associated with their pre-teen life. For me, Antoine De Saint-Exupéry addresses best how adults can negatively look on childhood play in his book The Little Prince. When talking about some drawings created as a child of a boa constrictor that adults mistake for a hat, the book’s narrator says: “The grown-ups advised me…

07/03/202107/03/2021

Question answered

I attended an online talk last night about the Festival of Britain, hosted by the Twentieth Century Society. Delivered by Geoffrey Hollis and supported by Elain Harwood, there were some fascinating photographs shown of London’s South Bank, and background information given on many of the architectural details of the structures and buildings constructed for the event. The talk also answered something that had been puzzling me for a few years. In 2017, I came across some benches in Lincolnshire with Abram Games famous festival logo cast into their concrete sides. Unsure why they would be there, no amount of research…

12/02/202103/05/2021

Graphic commons: End of year dérive

Date: 29.12.2020Distance: 5 milesSteps: 10,812Start: 13:34Ground covered: Residential to industrial area to dockside, return via town centre side-streets and residential areas As the end of the year looms I felt it was appropriate to head out into Tier 4 territory for one last dérive of 2020. Fearing a Tier 5 being implemented, given the dramatic increase in Covid-19 cases in Ipswich, this may also be my last chance for a while. While I didn’t set out to end up at the quay again, my feet took me there anyway. And as familiar as this territory is after my last drift…

30/12/202007/03/2021

200 2020 days

As we head towards the end of 2020, I predict many write-ups will state it was a year like no other. I’ll hold judgement on that—we haven’t had 2021 yet, after all. December is, however, the time of year when annual round-ups happen, and for me, one of the most interesting projects I have seen in the last 12 months has been by Becky King. King is Creative Director at the London office of branding agency Dragon Rouge, and has spent much of this year sharing her responses to being in lockdown on her Instagram account. While this itself has…

23/12/202007/03/2021

Graphic commons: an unexpected drift

Date: 10.12.2020Distance: 2.4 milesSteps: 5271Start: 07:37Ground covered: Residential area to dockside, return via university campus What started as simple exercise, to try to stave off a bad back from sitting at a desk for far too many hours, turned into a drift; the first one proper since my Lockdown 1.0 Constitutionals side project back in April. Although I have been out walking for exercise now and again in recent months, these occasions have been few and far between, and mostly involved a round-about trip to one of our many local Coops. And while I started on this occasion only intending…

15/12/202007/03/2021

We are type—125 years of St Bride Library

I have been fortunate enough to visit St Bride Library a number of times. I’ve mostly been for graphic design conferences or evening talks hosted by Eye Magazine. For the uninitiated, St Bride Library, just off Fleet Street in London, includes an events hall, a large archive of typographic, graphic design and publishing related books, and a printshop that hosts hands-on letterpress, engraving and book-binding workshops. It is so steeped in all-things print, that I am always disappointed that Swarfega doesn’t come out to the soap dispensers in the toilets whenever I have been there. 2020 sees the library celebrate…

15/11/202007/03/2021

Fluff and nonsense

Recently on Facebook I posted the following video by Mike Rich from the Steering YouTube channel. In it he discusses whether Graphic Design could be considered art. This is an often discussed topic, particularly amongst design students. I certainly have very firm views on the subject, and contend that they are different disciplines. As a result I find it difficult not to be drawn in to such debates. In response to posting the video, several friends commented with their views—some defensively, some more measured. Most were people who identify themselves as artists, or designer/artists, and their different takes on the…

04/10/202007/03/2021

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