What I thought I’d do today is start on my journey from the last job I did at uni right though to where I got today. So, I though it would be interesting for you to see my ups and downs and how I got there, some of the things I’ve worked on, so you can sort of come along with me on the journey really.So where it all started for me was I was at Salford University doing a design practice degree and I got really interested in typography and one of the last jobs I did was a brief for Fuse, the digital font thing with Neville Brody, and I got asked to do a typeface for that which led to Berliner which was, I was really interested in German design at the time, and I was really into Eric Speakerman and the Berlin wall thing was happening around that time and it was something I just got really in to, German design, there was some interesting German design companies at the time like Zion and Grappa that were doing some really interesting layered stuff and obviously the Berlin wall’s got all this layering of images on there and sort of instant art almost. So that was my main influence where I was creating this typeface for Fuse magazine at the time, which was Berliner. Basically, what it was, it was a typeface taking block letter type, and modernising it really, I enabled it to be stencilled onto, so you can create it instantly onto the Berlin wall, spray it on there. So, what we did we did it so that the letters had no counters so you could stencil it, and the counters became dots, and what made it interesting is it became kind of code-like, so it kind of lost its German roots, and became almost like a code. That was the interest of it, that’s what Fuse was all about, experimenting with letterforms and just going wild and it’s gone even more wild since, that was from Fuse 15 I think and it got to 20 before it stopped, they’ve started doing them again now but some of them aren’t even type, they’re just pictures and all sorts of things. I liked to stick to type because that’s what I was good at. So that’s where it all started for me really, and that was the poster for Fuse, and this was something that I created, using layered art, which inspired me in the first place. So that was my first job. That led me into setting up Darren Scott Typographic's, which was my font foundry so the first thing I did when I left university is I decided this was what I wanted to do, set up and design some typefaces. Basically, I had a few months sat at home, just got my head down and got ideas that I had off my chest. The digitiser at the time was Fontographer, I tend to use Font Lab now, Fontographer was the only one available at the time, and this was based on electronic circuitry, again, these were sold by T26 which was a type foundry, which was a new foundry at the time in Chicago, and they were just selling young designers fonts, they’re still going now and they do thousands and thousands of fonts now, they sell them really cheaply but it makes is accessible to everyone. So I basically just sat about doing these things, I’m not too much proud of these, they were part of my journey but they’re not the best quality typefaces that I’ve ever produced, I enjoy looking at them, but I never use my own typefaces anyway because they tend to, you look at them in a series of shapes and spaces in curning rather than actual words, when you’re setting them you tend to see the problems rather than the actual typeface itself so it’s really hard to use your own fonts. They’re really all kind of interesting but they’re not the kind of typefaces I actually use, they’re just these things that you create, you create them when you’re doing logos and you work them up into full alphabets and once it gets under your skin typography you go through this process of wanting to design more and more. Another type I did called Sodium, Eric Speakerman was doing a lot of typefaces for signage and I wanted to try and create a typeface that was more readable, this was kind of my first sans serif typeface that I produced and it had aspects of all my favourite typefaces in there. Everyone’s kind of said that looks a bit like this or a bit like that but it kind of does wear its influences on its sleeves really. That’s it when it’s set. These are just random Bob Dylan quotes and they’re just to show it working rather than the Quick Brown Fox, which everyone seems to use. This is Bad Angel, this was designed round the similar time, again it was just going mad with letter shapes really, really experimenting with different character shapes and how far you can push letters and make them say different things but readable as an alphabet. That was in Playboy magazine, and a few other magazines but Playboy was the most high profile magazine it was in. so it’s quite gothic, I have a lot of people, a lot of Goths saying they really love it and they use it on their heavy metal sleeves and that so it’s been used quite a lot in that sort of area. But it’s interesting cause you never go out to create that sort of look, it just evolves and I like to create typefaces and just disown them and see people interpret what I’ve done and obviously that comes across quite gothic. It’s always interesting to see how people use your fonts and you see it popping up everywhere. A lot of these things have been in magazines and on mastheads, for like Loaded magazine, and Horse and Hound are using one at the moment. This was in 1997, which was quite a long time ago, it was before the Grunge period started with David Carson, it was basically a headline font I did for a job, it was like rubbed down lettraset, created from that, scanned in and them streamlined, I think it was Helvetica Condensed, I just distorted it a little bit, took the counters out, it kind of worked. That was created in about two days to be honest, quite quickly done. T26 wanted to retail it so I worked it up into a full character set and away we went. Some people say its got a bit of a jazz feel to it. This was some stuff I did for T26, to promote the fonts, and I was doing stuff at the time with old bits of film and slide, hand creating stuff on 35mm transparencies, just scratching away at them and layering them to sort of make things and almost just random images. That’s what I was doing at the time and T26 asked me to do some postcards to promote their company and just do it in that style really and use their letters in their logo. We just played around using images that were used on posters and things. This is sort of handcrafted, which isn’t really like me, I’m quite technical. I tend to do things on the computer most of the time but at the time, I was just sort of experimenting and I kind of enjoyed it but I kind of left that and went back to the computer afterwards. This was at the time when David Carson was doing this kind of thing and it was really popular so this was the style at the time. Everyone was into the big grunge thing. So around a similar period, I went to McCann Erickson which is the biggest ad agencies in the world, got offices all over the world, head office in New York, and I worked at the Manchester one, it’s like 350 people there, clients like Coca Cola, Peugeot, Manchester United, big international brands. It gave me a change to learn a lot of skills that I didn’t have and learn a lot about corporate design, doing corporate identity and sort of applying my design to large projects, signage, all sorts of things which really interested me, it was really good. Some of the projects I did, I did the corporate ID for All Sports, I did the carrier bags which were really popular, everyone seemed to have them at the time, they were really popular, it was just All Sports repeated, all the kids had them. They were just asking to buy the bags, they were free if you bought a pair of trainers but they ended up giving more bags away than the actual product. It was interesting. These were some images we created for All Sports, we did the photographic styling for them, for their advertisements, their stuff in the windows, just telling them to go black and white, because before they had this blue, red and white which was very much a sports thing, which is a bit of a cliché. So we decided to take it back to black. All brands have different colours, you store has lots of different brands, lets make your brand a bit more neutral and you can put all the other colours with it. So we went to black, and no one was doing black at the time, this was before Size and people like that sort of followed suit and going more sort of street rather than sport. It was selling more casual clothes than sports wear at the time. So again, it was creating that more high fashion look, you had to be more imaginative with the styling really.
... At this point, the memory on my Dictaphone ran out!
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