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Fonts were my downfall.
Sometime around 1977, in an artists’ supplies shop in Kings Lynn where my mum was buying gouache paints, I discovered Wire-O bound Letraset and Letragraphica catalogues, and a seed was sown.
That you could layer what is said with how to say it on the page became a thing of wonder.
A bit later, not sure when, I learned that graphic design was a thing and that seemed soooo much more appealing as a vocation than joining the RAF…
…I had wanted to join the RAF because I was excited by the English Electric Lightnings and Hawker-Siddeley Harriers and Avro Vulcan bombers that regularly flew over our house on their way to the bombing ranges out in the Lincolnshire Wash.
And this seemed like a good concession to the desire of my dad, a retired career soldier, that I join the armed forces.
But now this couldn’t possibly win in competition with the idea that someone might pay me to make shapes on a printed page
…School was friction though. Being into maths *and* art was considered odd. I was good at drawing but not great. On learning that I wanted to be a graphic designer the careers advice was *don’t be*. It was too ‘competitive’ and you, Schofield, are a slacker. It’s true, I was.
But the bug was in me. I could not not try to become a graphic designer
…To my dad’s credit, he could see that he’d failed to convince me that camaraderie on the battlefield was *the prize* in life, and helped nudge me in the direction I wanted to go.
And then in 1984, 7 years after developing a font fetish, college offered me a course bifurcation: graphic design or advertising:
- Help people sell other people shit that they want but don’t need, either indirectly or overtly
- inform/persuade, or persuade/con like Mad Men.
I went with inform/persuade
…However, inform/persuade was still *help people sell to other people shit that they don’t need but learn that they want*.
Like a road man, helping the pusher move product.
But hey, do it with fonts ❤️ and coloured boxes and images.
And move from composing it with bits of paper stuck to a ‘layout board’ with hot wax, to doing it on a thing called a computer which is made with precious things that can barely be recycled and will slowly decompose in landfill in a far away country
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