Through the Back Door

I came to graphic design through the back door, using the writing skills I thought would make me a writer or teacher. Instead these skills lead to my employment as a copywriter and brochure designer for Prentice-Hall in New Jersey. Being dyslexic and not knowing it, I had failed more than one editor’s entrance spelling and editing test. This was my third interview and I begged the personnel director to let me take another test. He said, “The other is harder.” Instead he sent me to the copywriting department; they asked me to write and design a brochure and liked what I did.

On my first day at Prentice-Hall they gave me a typewriter, a binder crowded with typefaces, and introduced me to their photo archive. These were my tools, and I was totally hooked. But, still thinking I’d be a university professor, I moved on to a job designing for the University of Chicago Press in order to pay for grad school in English Literature. Two weeks after receiving my master’s diploma, I rediscovered it on a shelf over my drafting table where I’d left it to finish a design project. My career had chosen me.

My start in assemblage art followed a similar circuitous process. A designer friend was also a painter, and I admired his ability to do both. After once again listening to me complain about not producing any of my own art projects, he suggested we compile a list of words, phrases, and visual suggestions, and randomly choose one a month we could each use as a creative springboard and then share with the other. There were no other rules. We could use any materials and any format. We could even do the opposite. He had found the key. We had both been trained to create for clients; and he made us each other’s client.