Graphic Journey Blog

Michael Bernard: Wisdom from the graphic master: No2

This is the second mini recording with Michael ('Bernie') Bernard, the brilliant but forgotten 1960s designer. A man who has devoted much of his life to studying the concept of colour and its use and effect on our lives. Unfortunately, it became clear to me during the filming of this piece that Bernie is profoundly colour blind but, because of his infectious enthusiasm, I didn't have the heart to tell him that some of his colours were, well, slightly off. Anyway, here is more from the great man... 

 

 

Fifty years on No. 6

 

The year: 1968

This was me then...

Me with my first brand new car. My second VW Bettle

And here is some of the news for that year:

Bobby Kennedy was killed.

British Rail ran their last steam train.

The Beatles continued to dominate the charts with Hey Jude and...

The White Album with its minimalist cover by Richard Hamilton.

Dad's Army was screened for the first time.

I bought this album...

Having located a copy of The Bookseller in the local library, I eventually found the ad for the job as art director of William Heinemann. The description required the candidate to have experience of commissioning art, producing production artwork, liaising with printers, etc., etc. I quickly realised that to have any chance of getting this job, I would have to be extremely ‘economical’ with the truth. So at the interview I said ‘yes’ to everything, with great enthusiasm. Amazingly, it worked and I got the job and immediately began to panic. There was so much I didn’t know and what I quickly realised was that the very people who had interviewed me also knew very little about the job. Thinking quickly, I contacted the various printers who printed the finished book jackets and owned up to my inexperience. All were wonderfully generous and coached me in the mysteries of letterpress and offset litho printing, along with the various papers and finishes.
 
For the first time, I had a secretary and was left very much alone to get on with the job. The previous Art Director Tom Simmons had built up a very good body of designers that he commissioned, many of whom went on to very successful careers in advertising...

These two covers were by Ron Collins (left) and Neil Godfrey (right). They both went on to become giants in the advertising world

These two jackets were by a wonderful design collective called Churchill/Holmes/Kitley. They produced many covers during the 1960's and 1970's then disappeared, never to be seen again.

The first day I arrived at Heinemann the artwork for this jacket arrived on my desk. Designed by Alan Aldridge, who by that time, had become synonymous with The Beatles.

Initially I continued with many of them, but I soon started to make time to see new designers, as well as having my antennae out for what was going on. You have to remember that this was an age where the only form of immediate communication was this…

There was just one magazine: the monthly Design (above). Apart from its cover, it contained very few graphics. Other than this, there was Graphis magazine, and the D&AD, Modern Publicity, Penrose and Graphis annuals were all relatively expensive. So that was the main source of seeing other designers work, apart from magazines like Twen, Town and Nova and the colour supplements, which were relatively new but had great art directors commissioning some exciting things.
 
The publishing scene in 1968 was a very gentlemanly affair with many independent houses, not the large conglomerates we have today. Heinemann’s offices were situated on Queen’s Street, Mayfair. Chairman Dwye Evans; Managing Director Charles Pick; Editorial Director Roland Gantt; and Production Director Nigel Viney were all comfortably situated on the first floor with individual, plush rooms with oriental rugs and large mahogany desks set against walls lined with glass-fronted bookcases. They would be given morning coffee and afternoon tea (from India or China) along with biscuits served by the live-in housekeeper, Ella.

I quickly got used to seeing the likes of J.B. Priestley, Paul Gallico, Peter Ustinov, Patricia Highsmith and many more distinguished authors visiting the building. As I was situated on the top floor next to the publicity director, I would often be invited in for drinks and be exposed to these literary giants. I was still very green and rather uncomfortable in this elite company. Most of the people at Heinemann were university graduates and were very bright. Then there was me with one O-level in art still living with my parents in Dagenham. This was a different world and I was just bluffing my way through day by day. The Publicity Director William Holden was a wonderfully sympathetic and warm character. He picked up on my anxieties and very subtly set about helping me to overcome my inferiority complex. He’d make a point of including me in book launches, would take me to lunch, suggest food and wines and generally knocked me into shape to help me feel more at ease in this rarefied world of publishing. I embraced it wholeheartedly and am indebted to him for his generosity.

My film for the year.. 

Stanley Kubrick's ultimate trip, 2001: A Space Odyssey

And here is my effort for 1968...

I was beginning to illustrate more by this time, heavily influenced by the style of the time.

 

 

Alex McDowell: D&AD President's Award 2013

Alex McDowell RDI was in town today to pick up the D&AD President's Award from Neville Brody.

It also coincided with the launch of Man of Steel which Alex has art directed with his usual brilliance.

During the D&AD presentation Neville Brody said that "...his name is more or less unknown (in the UK)." Well, that is not quite true. Alex was made a Royal Designer by the RSA in 2006. And last year I recored a facinating interview with him which you can listen to here.

Fifty years on No. 5

The year: 1967

The Beatles shook up the pop world with this...

St Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band took 129 days to record, between autumn 1966 and spring 1967, and it changed the rock world. And today A Day in the Life still sounds fantastic, but back then it was astonishing.

A girl from my home town won the Eurovision Song Contest..

Dagenhan born Sandie Shaw won the 1967 Eurovision Song Contest with the diabolical Puppet On A String

Playwright Joe Orton was murdered...

Joe Orton (above) was killed by nine hammer blows to the head by his boyfriend Kenneth Halliwell, who also committed suicide at their first floor flat in Noel Road, Islington.

This was on our TV screens...

Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner, the big TV hit of '67

The BBC started to broadcast in colour...

And the great man of soul died in a plane crash...

Ottis Reading died in December 1967 while flying to a gig in the US.  

A big year of change for me. I got married and was now working at Cato/Peters/O’Brien in the heart of London’s West End, surrounded by Ivy League Americans drinking coffee and eating doughnuts for breakfast. I was in heaven. Initially I had turned the job down but was persuaded to change my mind by the extremely persuasive boss Mac Cato.

Three of my co-workers,16 year old secratary Rosemary Wilmot with artworker Bill Cooper. In the background the general studio hand, Dougie at the Albermarle Street studio.

There was another extremely talented designer at the studio called Richard Tilly, nicknamed ‘Ginger’ because of his mop of ginger hair. He was a scooter-riding Mod, complete with a badge-strewn, fur-collared Parker. Another member of staff was Virginia Clive-Smith, a rose-tinted spectacled, multi-beaded, hippy beauty – she had originally worked at Conran’s design department alongside Barney Bubbles when he went under the name of Colin Fulcher. She was super bright with a devastatingly cutting rhetoric.  As an inexperienced and rather naive 22-year-old, I felt rather inferior and gave her a wide berth when it came to any kind of argument. A lot of the work there was not for me, like soap powder packaging for Proctor & Gamble with little creative manoeuvrability, as you can see from this photo of me in the studio and the project on my desk…

Not a happy looking bunny when working on soap packs.

But we also had CBS as a client and, because of my experience of adding type to book jackets, I would often be given album covers to do. I’d just be handed a photo, title and track listing and be told to produce a cover in two hours, because the fee was so small. Outside of this, I had been building up a lot of freelance book cover work, which I would produce in my spare time. I even sometimes collaborated with Ginger, who was also a talented illustrator. From the studio window looking down onto Albemarle Street, we would often see The Beatles,

The Beatles could do no wrong in 1967

whose management offices were just around the corner. Another regular was Francis Bacon, who would go to the same little Italian café close by to his gallery the Marlborough, which was next door to our building in Albemarle Street.  My time at Cato/Peters/O’Brien sharpened me up as a designer, particularly working alongside other talented people. For the first time for me, this set up a sense of competition.

Above the Cato/Peters/O'Brien offices in Albermale Street

Just before the company moved to Queensway, another talented individual arrived in the shape of Roger Harris, a man with a beautiful line quality to his drawings and now a successful print maker.

The work of Roger Harris

The company moved in 1968, which coincided with me getting itchy feet and being on the lookout to move onto a greater challenge. The opportunity presented itself when I was picking up a book cover commission from William Heinemann. Their then Art Director Tom Simmons told me he was leaving and suggested I consider applying for the job, which had just been advertised in The Bookseller magazine. I’d never heard of it and had to hunt it down. And that will form the next part of my journey and a wonderful decade in the world of publishing.

My film for that year...

The Graduate directed by Mike Nichols

This my job for that year...

Throughout 1967/8 I was building up freelance work from publishers. For this book jacket, published by Hodder & Stoughton I experimented with photographic distortion.I drew up the concentric circles in black on white on paper, crumpled it and photographed it in my parents back garden. I then created a high contrast 'line' print to use on the cover artwork. All for a handsome £18 guineas fee. (appox £296 in today’s money)

Alan Fletcher Archive

Today the Alan Fletcher Archive website went live. I had the great pleasure of writing the archive story. So do pop over to see Alan’s wonderful design legacy. Click here

Things I like...

Back in the 1960s when the Radio Times was still printed letterpress and, apart from the cover, was only in black and white there was a wonderful array of pen and ink illustrators who created very personal styles, among them Jim Russell whose work I absolutely adored. This is my favourite of Jim’s work from that special period of Radio Times.

Fifty years on No. 4

The year: 1966

This was me in 1966 with my first Volkswagen Beetle

Time magazine coined the term ‘Swinging London’.

Twiggy was everywhere

 

BBC screened the moving and controversial film by Ken Loach, Cathy Come Home

John Lennon caused a major uproar when he commented "We're more popular than Jesus now". In America, fans were encouraged to take their Beatles records and memorabilia to be publically burned on the eve of The Beatles’ Memphis concert  

Nova, sporting its new typeface, would go on to take the Gold pencil at the 1967 D&AD Awards

Meanwhile across the pond the great George Lois was still producing great covers for Esquire magazine

David Gentleman was beginning his asstonishing output of stamp designs for Royal Mail

Oh yes, and England won the World Cup in that year 4-2 against West Germany

My film for 1966 was Seconds directed by John Frankenheimer

Seconds with a title sequence designed by Saul Bass

My time at the artist agents Bryan Colmer & Partners was very fruitful. I slowly started to understand and began to love typography, even though I had little formal training. I’d bought Josef Müller-Brockmann’s The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems in 1963, when I stumbled across it while attending calligraphy evening classes. I found the book baffling, but it struck a chord with me and encouraged me to buy books on all aspects of creativity, which became my art school. Here are a few that I bought back in 1966…

I read them from cover to cover and put their advice into practice. I made lots of mistakes of course, but slowly things began to gel. As the in-house designer at the artist agents, I had masses of opportunities to improve my typography on the many covers that passed through.

I started visiting publishers to attempt to pick up freelance book cover work. These were the days when London was littered with dozens of small, independent publishing houses. My favourite ploy was to visit bookshops and make a note of the publishers producing good covers. I’d then phone them from a telephone box, get through to the art editor or art director and tell them how good I thought they were. People like knowing that their work is appreciated. The approach worked because I slowly built up a regular flow of work outside of my day job.
 
My evenings were spent reading manuscripts and producing cover designs. My time at Bryan Colmer came to an end when I met an American illustrator who the firm had signed up. He was instrumental in my next step on the creative ladder. I left the artist agents and ended up working for a newly formed American-run design consultancy, Cato/Peters/O’Brien, located in fashionable W1...

 

Above the mailer that Cato/Peters/O'Brien sent out in advance of their arrival in London

It was the beginning of a big change for me (you can learn more about that meeting and what happened to me next in an earlier post here).

And this is my selected job from that year…

From a series for publishers Jonathan Cape in 1966. These were the days when one would be restricted in the print process. Here I was contained to 3-colour line for these 2 jackets.

 

Nick Park: Graphic Journey Radio No.1

Nick Park (left) with me at Ardman Annimations

Earlier this month I visited Aardman Animations in Bristol. I was there to interview Nick Park, creator of Wallace & Gromit, Creature Comforts and Shaun the Sheep, and recipient of a shedload of awards, including a staggering four Oscars.
 
Now, you would think all that success would have serious ego inflation. Not a bit of it. Park is one of the most modest creatives I have ever met, reinforcing my view that truly talented people don’t have to go around shouting about themselves: their work says it all.
 

5ft (1.5m) models of Gromit ready to be displayed across Bristol.
 
In July, the large-scale Gromit statues (above) will be put on display around the city of Bristol, before being auctioned off in September in aid of the Bristol Children's Hospital. They have been individually decorated by a range of invited artists and designers, including Sir Paul Smith, Cath Kidston, illustrator Simon Tofield and animator Richard Williams, along with Aardman’s own creative team.
 
Okay, so let’s kick off with the first Graphic Journey Radio interview: No.1 Nick Park/Stop-motion animator.

Grap Journey Radio_ N. Park

 

Fifty years on No. 3

The year: 1965

In 1965 I looked like this (above not below!)

The controversial Till Death Us Do Part was first screened. There were still only 3 TV channels and all in black & white

This was finished. The Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower), complete with revolving restaurant was opened by Harold Wilson

The Beatles released their 6th album

My harmonica hero, Sonny Boy Williams died in that year

I bought this album. R&B was my passion back then with frequent visits to the Marquee Club

This was my favourite film of 1965, Repulsion directed by Roman Polanski

Towards the end of 1965 I’d had enough of being forced to use Albertus, hand-lettering titles on Boy’s Own Paper cover illustrations and endlessly pasting up pages for a toy catalogue. I’d spend my lunchtimes visiting bookshops to peruse the book cover designs. I’d also got into the habit of ‘liberating’ book jackets from my local library and had built up a substantial collection. My evenings were spent redesigning covers that I didn’t like and I put those into a little A4 plastic folder with a grandiose but naive view of showing publishers.
 
One day while wandering down Farringdon Road I happened on a window that had a wonderfully detailed illustration placed on a tabletop easel. It turned out to be the offices of an artist agent that had just opened. I went in to enquire about the illustration and was told it was by a man called Tom Adams. It meant nothing to me at the time, but I could tell he was something very special.

This was the illustration in the window for John Fowles The Magus illustrated by Tom Adams

As I was about to leave, a tall, elegant man sporting a pin-striped suite and flowered tie arrived. He asked me why I was interested in the illustration. I explained my desire to design book covers but that I didn’t quite know how to go about it. “Come and see me with your work tomorrow,” said this rather dapper individual with a cut-glass RP accent. I spent that night hurriedly designing another sample cover to add to my meagre collection. The next day, I was sitting in front of him, slightly on edge, while I watched his elegant fingers turning the pages of my pathetic little folder.
 
He finished, took a long drag on his cigarette and said: “I can’t make any promises, but call me tomorrow, and I’ll have a think.” Well, he thought and offered me the job of in-house designer, responsible for the typography on the book covers that their artists had produced illustrations for. The agent was called Bryan Colmer Artists and the man who’d offered me the job was an old Etonian named Virgil Pomfret. I am indebted to him for recognising something in an unsophisticated, self-taught, non-art-school-trained kid from Dagenham.
 
So here’s my job for that year…

My 1965 book cover. Designed, illustrated and Letraseted all for a bumper £12 fee. As you can see I still had much to learn.

Things I like…

Cover illustration by Donna Brown (also know as Donna Muir), Penguin Books, circa 1970’s ? I love the delicacy of Donna’s early work.