Love your editor
Designer/illustrator John Hughes at the October meeting — Robert Byrnes reports
John Hughes, guest speaker at the Society’s October meeting, is the sort of graphic designer/illustrator that editors should cherish. He has about 20 years’ experience in the field, he’s understanding and easy-going, he has a lively sense of humour — and he knows how much difference a good editor can make to a publication. It wasn’t always that way. In his long-ago studies at the Queensland College of Art (QCA) no one explained to him ‘those little squiggles that editors put on paper’, and it wasn’t until he’d been working for some time at Queensland’s School of Distance Education that he first met an editor in the flesh. The school’s editors, by the way, were ‘on such a short leash’ that they might have been better described as mere proofreaders.
Like so many people in so many fields of endeavour, John stumbled into his profession by default. He didn’t study art at school, intending to go into science. Later, though, he realised that he ‘wasn’t going to become a scientist’ but that he could draw; so he did a two-year QCA certificate in commercial art. He considers himself lucky to have chosen the certificate rather than the three-year graphic design degree, because it was much more practical in orientation and a lot more useful when the time came to look for a job.
John now works for Effigy, a small design studio at Geebung, many of whose clients, he lamented, perceive an editor as superfluous and believe that all they need to do is write some copy and get the graphic designer to drop it into the design. But experience had taught him that the editor is often ‘the real influence’ when a job turns out well. The earlier an editor can be brought into a project to work alongside the graphic designer, the better.
John compared graphic design with wine-making — the fermentation of a number of quality ingredients including text, graphics, audience targeting and editing. But time was needed if the process was to work properly: even with quality ingredients you’d end up with just ‘grape juice’ if you didn’t have enough time. At the other extreme, with good ingredients and also a lot of time you might obtain the equivalent of a Grange Hermitage, but it would be an expensive product — most probably too expensive. Better to go for quality ingredients and a reasonable amount of time; that way you were likely to get ‘a quality wine at the right price’.
If clients didn’t think they needed an editor, John was asked, could studios such as Effigy perhaps employ their own editor to work on projects? The problem for small studios, he said, was that they simply couldn’t afford an inhouse editor if they wanted to stay competitive. They might, however, conceivably find it possible to hire a sort of ‘jack of all trades’: an editing all-rounder who could also coordinate projects and do the proofreading.
John provided some endearing insights into the soul of the graphic designer. Good designers, he explained, saw their designs as their ‘children’, to be loved and nurtured. This was why it was often a heart-rending process for a designer to submit, say, three design proposals for the same job. And design was very subjective: it was something about which everyone not only had an opinion, but was all too ready to express it. The best environment for a designer was to be part of a team where each of the members had a role to play and everyone respected everyone else.
John passed around bulky folders documenting his trajectory from his first job ($5 an hour with an advertising agency) to the present, via TV graphics for Channel 7, a spot of freelancing, working with Desktop Art at Arana Hills, and short periods at the magazines Style and Splash as well as a decade and a half with Education Queensland. They demonstrated just how much the techniques of graphic design and illustration have evolved in the past quarter century. He also had with him copies of his Effigy business card, which reads: ‘This is my card. It’s all about me, John Hughes. I design stuff …’.