20 years

I turned 40 this year.

Which means I’ve been designing in a serious way for half of my life. 20 years of experience… or is it 40? Because the first 20 weren’t nothing either.

Before I ever touched a design brief, I was just a kid noticing things. What made a record sleeve jump out to me. Understanding why I had an affinity with blackletter type (before I knew it what blackletter type was). Why one Gatecrasher flyer got binned, and another got copied for my GCSE art folder. Drawing abstract letterforms I saw in the backgrounds of rap videos on MTV Base. This is the raw material everything else in the years that followed got built on. It was all research. By the time I was ‘officially’ learning design at university, I’d already been forming opinions about it for at least a decade without knowing what I was doing.

Then the lost years in full-time education: interning at studios around the country, designing record covers and gig flyers for beer money, working three other jobs on top of it all just to make the mortgage. Nobody was grading any of that. A few years later I was running my own studio alongside a streetwear shop and a pizza place, which taught me more about running a creative business than any qualification did. I'd spent years as an agent for illustrators and artists — sitting outside the work, judging what was good on someone else's behalf, which is its own kind of training nobody names. I authored books, curated exhibitions and taught design at degree level.

So — am I 20 years in, or 40? I’d argue the clock was running all along.