Collage

I've spent an unsavoury chunk of this year unable to loiter in the book shops and charity shops of York; my eyes and fingers starved of the vital printed inspiration that feeds my own work. Frustrated, I've redirected this attention towards my own bookshelves, revisiting a personal library too often taken for granted. Unfortunately, reading and looking isn't enough for all that pent-up poring-over energy. No, I've taken to cutting things up.

Restlessly keen to pounce upon any passing creative bandwagon, I've found myself working the recent resurgence of collage into my book design. I've been cutting and pasting for real for a change and it's incredibly satisfying. If a little destructive.

I'm enjoying getting back in touch with material. I design physical products, but my part in the process usually takes place entirely under glass. Sometimes I don't get to actually feel my work until months later. And it's an odd thing to complain about, but working on screen, one is spoilt by too much power; everything can be changed, everything can be undone. There are no limits. I feel like a drone pilot attacking an image from afar with complete impunity, rather than getting up close and working with it.

With collage, the joy comes with sourcing and selecting the material; tackling the constraints and the qualities of the material; being steered in an unexpected direction by the size or quality or texture of the images you've found. Finding new contexts and juxtapositions for images divorced of meaning. You have to make decisions and you have to commit to them. It all feels so much more definite.

Delving deeper and messilier into this medium, I've discovered practical considerations that I'd always taken for granted. A shameless banal inquisitor, my instincts drive me to hunt down and pester my favourite collagists to get some insight into their techniques. Where do you source materials? How do you organise them? Do you use scissors or a knife? What form of adhesive do you use? Do you work entirely by hand, or do you finish off digitally? Do you photograph or scan the finished piece? (It turns out his is a particularly big one, as the same piece of work can look enormously different depending upon how you finally capture it.)

Fortunately, this interrogation has mostly been done for me thanks to recent collections of contemporary collage artists, such as DR. ME's Cut That Out and Rebeka Elizegi's Collage by Women, joining various other monographs and collections on my bookshelves. Part of the enjoyment of wandering down a new creative path is the study of it – while I litter my desk with shards of paper and my fingers with paper cuts, I'm learning about a whole new world.

So why is collage having a moment? Is it a response to to the proliferation of digital forms? An embrace of the opening up of public access archives, ripe for plundering? A technique that lends itself to social media's creation-as-performance environment? The natural resting state of twenty-first century's fragmented culture? Or is it popular with art directors right now simply because … it's popular with art directors right now? Probably all of the above, plus a hundred other reasons.

The big question for me: how do I resist cannibalising these books? Is there a limit to collaging collages of collages? No, before I make any more cuts, I must amass some new old source material. Those shops are calling me. I want some books that I don't want so that I can destroy them and make books with them and … I really need to get out more.

CR40

Creative Review is 40! Lots of retrospective treats to dip into, including: an oral history from previous editors; 40 creative moments that changed culture; my hazy memories of taking over the magazine’s twitter account; and a lovely new cover from Annie Atkins.

High School High

You can’t beat an ultra-specific instagram account – one of my favourites is High School High, Veronica Kraus' collection of old high school yearbooks. Borne out of printing constraints, budgets, experimentation and good old-fashioned playfulness, there’s a wild charm to these designs. The naiveté-gusto of 1970s high school year book committee kids is a design force to be reckoned with; just pure unfiltered, unsullied teenage creativity. Grids be damned, this stuff is always a refreshing kick up the bum if you’re stuck on a job.

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Walter Benjamin’s Writing Tips

I’m working on the cover for a book about philosopher Walter Benjamin, perhaps best known for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (the most recent edition impeccably designed by David Pearson for Penguin’s Great Ideas series). Amongst the rest of my research, I came across his Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses, from the 1928 book One-Way Street:

1. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

2. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

3. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

4. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

5. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

6. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

7. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

8. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

9. Nulla dies sine linea ['No day without a line'] — but there may well be weeks.

10. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

11. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

12. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

13. The work is the death mask of its conception.

It occurs to me that most of these could be applied to designing as well as writing. I particularly like the thought of an idea as an alien … for whom you’re making a death mask … or something. Hang on, let me read it again.

Own Brand

I’ve finally got my hands on Own Label by Jonny Trunk, a look at the work of Sainsbury’s in-house design studio from the sixties and seventies. And it’s just lovely. There’s a lot of incredible design in there – and on the rather impressive Sainsbury’s Archive site – but it’s the typography-and-geometry stuff that really grabs me. The shelf-stacking, trolley-shepherding me from twenty-five years ago would find this fascination very strange indeed.

Neil Gaiman

In May 2012, Neil Gaiman delivered the commencement address at Philadelphia's University of the Arts, sharing thoughts on creativity, bravery, and strength. As the world goes through one big communal tough time, these words spring to mind:

When things get tough, this is what you should do: Make good art. I’m serious. Husband runs off with a politician — make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by a mutated boa constrictor — make good art. IRS on your trail — make good art. Cat exploded — make good art. Someone on the Internet thinks what you’re doing is stupid or evil or it’s all been done before — make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, eventually time will take the sting away, and that doesn’t even matter. Do what only you can do best: Make good art. Make it on the bad days, make it on the good days, too.

The whole speech is available in Gaiman’s Make Good Art, a lovely little book (designed by Chip Kidd) full of big wisdom.

Shatterhand

So I decided to start the year by breaking myself. At the end of a rare week off, I thought the family could do with one last hurrah of festive merriment together – ice skating! What could possibly go wrong with a few gentle laps of the rink? I could teach the boy a thing or two with my amazing pirouetting skills!

Cut to one hour later and I'm sat in A&E, cradling a broken wrist and bruised ego, feeling thoroughly sorry for myself. Ten minutes in the waiting area – just enough time to flick through a battered 2014 issue of Horse & Hound – and I go straight in to see the doctor.

Following a quick dose of gamma radiation, he shows me my x-ray, pointing out an embarrassingly small chip of bone floating about in the grey mass of hand; insignificant enough that he has to draw a circle around it in case I can't see it (I can't see it). As I explain my graceless escapade, he chuckles along – oh what japes! – and then launches into the small talk, asking about my day job. I'm not great at explaining how/where/why I work at the best of times, so just I mutter some vague self-deprecations and say penguin a lot.

I feel a bit silly talking about my relatively insignificant profession – he mends lives while I drag words and pictures around a rectangle – but he laps it up, apparently fascinated by the ins and outs of book design. Okay, always good to meet a fan, maybe I should get my phone out and talk him through my portfolio and … oh I get it. He's nodding along, politely feigning interest and maintaining conversation to distract me from the fact he's yanking my wrist every which way. As he smilingly contorts me into various agonising positions (some of which I'm not sure were even possible pre-accident and are possibly some kind of deliberate karmic punishment), he continues asking me about my craft.

What he doesn't say, but is almost certainly thinking: You have the bone density of a sparrow. Maybe leave your desk once in a while and do some proper exercise, not just the occasional attempt at a triple axel after watching I, Tonya one time. Frankly I'm amazed you're not shattered all over. Spend five minutes with Joe Wicks every now and then at the very least. Please.

And: You'll have to carry on without the safety net of sick pay. And you don't have income protection for this sort of incident, do you? You were just blithely going along, assuming you could spend your entire professional life without incident, weren't you? The welfare of your family depends entirely upon you being able to push a little arrow around on your computer for money, but apparently that's less important than making sure you're financially covered in case your Playstation breaks down. Food gathered in Red Dead Redemption will not feed you, DO YOU KNOW THIS?

Furthermore: What if some random pandemic completely knocks the work off your desk and clogs the hospitals indefinitely? Will this careless injury be dealt with as efficiently? Will I want to be dealing with your latest pratfall? Your livelihood depends upon you NOT BEING HERE WITH ME. Why aren't you prepared for this, funny little book man?

He makes some good unspoken points. I leave with a pathetic latex thing wrapped around my wrist, a new feeling of professional precariousness hanging over me. For the next couple of months I'm a painkiller-addled left-handed designer. I'll cope. As long as the rest of the year goes without incident, I'll be fine.