Art Director
Having always been interested in art and design, I left school after completing my A'levels to pursue such a career. After being employed as a fine art restorer for a while, I found myself an apprenticeship at a design agency way before computer generated design or Apple Macs were used. I stayed there for 4 years learning traditional tools of the trade, designing and pasting-up layouts on drawing boards for magazines and newspapers. The knowledge and skills I learned there led me to study an HND in Graphics at Lincoln Art College.
Following this I spent the next few years at the publishers Emap working on lifestyle magazines and specialist titles, even managing to pick-up the odd award here and there! This experience enabled me to spend a couple of years travelling and freelancing. One of the companies I was working in was taken over by a publishing company and I was appointed as Art Director with the aim of setting-up an art department within the new publishing firm. This enabled me to diversify my design skills into management and to be involved in other aspects of editorial work. However after three and a half years I grew tired of the publishing environment and wanted to move into other areas of design. Hence, here I am at EMI!
When I was younger I played the drums for about fifteen years in several bands, so when I was offered the position of Art Director at EMI, the idea of combining my interests of music and design into one job seemed too good to be true! The objective of my position here at EMI was similar to my last - to build an art department from scratch and gather a team of designers to support the Liberty, Gold and Catalogue labels. We design album covers, point of sale material and pretty much anything that needs design input. I commission photographers, illustrators and designers, and take care of the design and art departments budgets. I'm also starting to get more and more involved in art direction of photo shoots and videos, which is a really fun part of the job and dealing directly with artists and managers puts a whole new dimension on the role! Quite often an artist thinks that all we need to get an album cover design is to simply put a programme in the system and press a button- little do they realise that we spend hours slaving over a hot computer, using all our creative talent, to deliver each and every masterpiece!
EMI's really behind us, investing all the time to ensure we have the latest and top of the range technology. The department's doing so well now that we're expanding with another person and two freelancers. I can't wait to see what else is round the corner!
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