What inspired you?
[Editorial] Published 2007 in Grafik 150 — a book celebrating inspiration, with contributions from leading designers.
In 1993 I wasn’t a graphic designer. I was a well travelled skateboarder with a bar job. I’d ended a long-term(inal) relationship and was sharing a house with a cluster of hippie friends. Young and single, we existed in and out of each other’s, and other people’s, ‘bits’, and aside from the washing-up, our world was relatively carefree.
Retro guitar chivalry by the likes of Black Sabbath and The Stooges was our soundtrack. A Tribe Called Quest and Rage Against The Machine kept things current, but for me this was to be the time of my Led Zeppelin awakening.
I learned their riffs on my Fender and was Hipgnotised (sic) by their record covers. Houses of the Holy in particular. Here I witnessed fragile infant humans ascending The Giant’s Causeway toward a malevolent horizon. It was beautiful, sinister and fascinating. The gatefold interior was equally arresting. Houses of the Holy had blown my hot-knifed mind, man.
Two of my housemates were studying design, and so somewhere between noseying at their layouts and gazing at Zep’s ambiguous cover art, this skate zine publishing bartender threw in the beer towel, graphically designed a fuse, and lit it.
(200 word editorial for Grafik Magazine, 2007)
