I always find it a little tricky trying to find good print pieces. I have two portfolios of my work, both full.
The first is my primary portfolio, displaying the stuff that absolutely cannot be left out.
The second—which is literally full to bursting—contains work that was good enough to keep but that, for some reason, doesn't quite make the cut. Some of the material is not directly related to my design work and instead contains reviews that I wrote for Fringe newspapers.
A lot of the other stuff is things that I liked the concept of but which bever quite came out as well as they should have done. Or possibly they are posters that were good enough but not actually good enough, if you know what I mean.
By far the bulk of the pieces are those that I liked when I did them, but now regard with a somewhat jaundiced eye.
But enough of the second rate stuff: what about the primary portfolio?
Well, it's full of good work. The stuff that isn't perfect is only so because of the constraints of the time; ten years ago, when I first started designing, full colour printing just wasn't viable on the budgets that I was working to (so I became an expert in pushing the boundaries of what spot colours were capable of).
Some of it is full of the novelty stuff that did work: fine foil-blocking, or the printing of a spot colour onto a metallic to get an exceptionally "lifted" effect, for instance. Some of it is workmanlike stuff that the client was happy with and which I remain reasonably satisfied with these years later.
Many of the pieces show promise, or an unlikely mode of thinking that has not yet been pursued: perhaps one day I will get the chance to investigate those avenues more fully.
However, almost all of my pieces share a common problem: they were never designed for display on the web.
One tends to forget the rapid pace of change; when I started desigining, in 1997, the web did not exist in any meaningful way. There was email (and the university of Edinburgh had a basic intranet) and some websites, but they were not ubiquitous in the way that they now are.
Even as I developed and moved through my first two companies, websites were something unusual. Then they moved into the realm of something that you had to have, but no one quite knew what was supposed to be on them. Or how to achieve that—especially in the notably slow-to-adopt, small printer industry.
In any case, it is near impossible to reproduce a metallic ink online, or foil-block. Embossing never looks like it feels, and all too often the vibrancy of the physical, printed object is lost online.
Further, when files are not designed for cross-media display, they take a long time to process and when you have nearly a terabyte of files, even sorting through to find the best ones—let alone opening all of those Freehand, Pagemaker, Quark or Indesign files, hunting down the fonts, relinking the images, and processing them into something that the web can cope with—is not only unbelievably time-consuming, but mind-bogglingly dull.
As a result, the design pieces that you will find here are those that suit the web medium, weren't to difficult to track down and which do demonstrate that I can do "design" and not just sinister-looking pieces of nightmare art.
As for the rest: well, I can bring my portfolios to the interview with me...
