The Cow Gum Kids

“This was what made the top art directors the rock stars of their profession“

As mine was the last generation to be trained classically in the traditional craft-based methods of graphic design production and, as there are very few of us left still working at the coal face, I thought it might be of interest to share a few memories of the pre-digital production process in a design studio back in the late 60s and early 70s when I was just starting out.

Back then, working in a design studio was a bit like being in a band. There was a hierarchy of creatives – art directors, designers, visualisers, artworkers and finally, the roadie of the band, the much-maligned studio junior. Each person had their own specialism and the emphasis was much more on teamwork than today. You relied on each other to produce high quality work and to meet deadlines as projects were, of necessity, generally produced on a conveyor belt system and passed down the production chain at each subsequent phase. In a labour intensive schedule there was no way of cutting corners as every phase of the project was produced by hand. It was a band of brothers and sisters working together for a common goal. Personally, I dedicated myself as much to becoming a producer of high quality artwork as being a good designer and visualiser as this gave you another string to your bow when looking for work, (in very short supply in the 1970s!). Immense satisfaction could be got from producing a piece of artwork that reflected the standards of the studio and the appreciation of client, colleagues and printer of a clean and accurate piece of work was reward enough for the extra time and care taken.

Design

Each art director had their own style for producing scamps, which were very rough illustrations used to showcase ideas to clients. Mainly roughed out in black and white, this is where the ability to draw was more than vital – an art director couldn’t do without drafting skills. Also the ability to think on your feet in brainstorming meetings and produce a visual of your idea on paper within seconds was paramount. This was what made the top art directors the rock stars of their profession. They had the ability to perform and create in a live environment in front of their audience and they were extremely skilful and valuable people and therefore quite rare.

From there the chosen concept would be passed on to the designer to draft up a finished visual of the selected concept on detail paper using pantone markers. This was still a very rough process and, again, depended on the designer’s drawing abilities. Some visualisers left their work very open at this stage using a slick style in order to be able to meet tight deadlines and not commit too much to the look of the final piece of work. The production of this phase of the project was usually starved of time, with the client impatient to see a close representation of the finished project. Each studio had a preferred visualising style depending, in some cases, on the preferences of the client and how close you were required to depict the final, printed project. For instance, in the blazing hot summer of 1976 I was working in a studio with a team of 10 designers each using paintbrush and gouache to laboriously colour photographic print outs to colour headline type! Slog was not the word and care had to be taken not to let drops of sweat ruin the finished piece.

Semi-artworking

Towards the end of my traditional-based career I used this skill to develop a style of visualising that, for the time, was almost a perfect facsimile of how the project would look when printed — I called it semi-artworking. It was based on producing a black and white base print from a rough artwork layout and working over it with coloured gouache. Images were cut and pasted from photo library catalogues, then quite a new thing. A real speciality was to use different materials to show print techniques that were just becoming popular. Metallic boards to show solid backgrounds of metallic ink, film overlays could be used to indicate selective varnishes and blocks could be cut and stamped from art board to depict solid areas of embossing. As you can imagine, all very labour intensive, but the clients appreciated it to such an extent that we won 10 pitches against other design companies in a row. Oh for that record nowadays!

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