Not long after my adventure in the Hollywood hills, I was commissioned to design the cover for Martin Booth’s A Very Private Gentleman. The book is about one Signor Farfalla, believed to be a painter by his rural village, in reality, Farfalla is the maker of custom-made assassin’s weaponery.

At the beginning of 1988, and still at Slatter-Anderson, I was getting busier with self-employed work. I was being commissioned by Transworld books, plus regular cartoon and design jobs for Video Arts. Meanwhile, at Slatter-Anderson I was working on an extensive test packaging project for Elida Gibbs for All Clear hair products and “re-imagined” toothpaste tubes. I was doing all the lettering artwork and technical drawings – oh, the glamour!

In early 2001 I got a call. I was running late for a meeting, and I debated whether to pick up the phone. I did and a voice at the other end said, “Do you want to design the best rock ’n’ roll book this century?”

I did. This is not the sort of offer a book designer gets everyday.

In design every career there comes those break-through moments; for me there were three in as many months – 1984 was an amazing year!  

In July of that year I received my degree in Graphic Design and Typography from Exeter College of Art and Design. Secondly, my external examination assessor, Brian Sanders, liked my final degree show.

Around this time Slatter-Anderson was also working on promotional work for Bruce Oldfield and I was tasked with designing a 12-page advert for Vogue for his range of tights, which he had designed for Charnos. Variety was ever the spice of life and on another day warm day I headed down to Bruce’s workshop in Fulham to meet him, select the photos and plan the 12 page spread.

Back in the late 80s the Falcon Game Book Series was highly innovative; the reader was the hero, taking a story path of their own choosing. Today, this is laughably tame and laborious, compared with our easily accessible digital escapism, role playing on our smart phones across time zones and continents. But, remember, this was all before Alan Sugar introduced the Amstrad home computer, complete with its 3.5” floppy discs. Internet for all was in its infancy and Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) was THE ‘gaming’ experience.

Towards the end of 1988 the announcement was made that Chatto, Jonathan Cape, Chatto Poetry and The Hogarth Press were to become part of Random House Group. This would also mean a move from Chatto’s lovely Georgian offices in Bedford Square to Random House HQ that occupied a modern building in Chandos Place, Covent Garden. The ground was shifting under my feet and as publishing world began to change it was a worrying time.

My 20 months at Slatter-Anderson were a blur… Learning a lot in a short space of time, I worked on a truly diverse range of design jobs

During the 1980s Blockbusters was a hugely popular TV quiz in the UK. An American import, the show’s enthusiastic contestants answered trivia questions based on an initial letter that they picked from a board. The idea being to complete a run of letters and create a word before the opposition.  Say, “I’ll have a B please Bob” to anyone of a certain age and they’ll know instantly what you’re talking about. 

I was speaking to an MD of a successful firm recently at a networking event and she was telling me about what a turbulent time they had had in the business – leaders had left and the remaining team were working out how to find their feet and their new voice.