tEN DEER WHAT?

Let me first address my anonymous moniker. It’s an anagram because I couldn’t find a name for my website that hadn’t already been taken. Do I like it? Yes. It’s quirky and it makes no sense to anyone but me. Do I regret choosing it? Yes. I’m constantly required to spell out my email address to ensure no one crafts their message rather lovingly to “tender sigh”.

The following will give you some background blurb as to how I ended up working as a book designer. It is largely non-fiction. (See what I did there?)

Uncle number one was a London advertising executive. With his beard, constant pipe smoking and love of safari attire, he was less Don Draper, more Ernest Hemingway. His son was a jeweller. When I was eight, he bribed me to be one of his bridesmaids by making me a silver necklace with my name on it so that I would wear a flowery dress and smile for the official photos.

Uncle number two was an engineer by day and an artist by night. Whilst this makes him sound like a hybrid of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Toulouse-Lautrec, he painted watercolour landscapes, not Victorian ladies of ill repute. His eldest daughter did a fashion degree and sold her designs into Harrods. By all accounts, she is now a jeweller who travels around New Mexico lecturing on Indigenous American culture. The youngest went into ceramics and now also volunteers as a firefighter in New South Wales. As a snowflake whose daily risk involves choosing either dairy or soy when ordering coffee, I am wholly grateful that people like her exist.

My father was an engineer for the aerospace industry. I grew up watching him hunched over an enormous drawing board whilst he translated complicated mechanical ideas from his brain onto thick tracing paper via a pencil and slide rule. He could design and build almost anything without resorting to either instructions or an Alan key. (It was during these occasions I learned a few choice words that would serve me well in my own later life as a creative.) He made the divan bed I would sleep on for well over a decade; tile-clad coffee tables; a drinks trolley that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the set of Abigail’s Party; and my personal favourite, a cabinet for the TV which was so large it was affectionately known as “Broadcasting House”. His closet desire to be a cartoonist, combined with his Roald Dahl-like wit when crafting poetry, meant I have been the recipient of several homemade cards over the years. Whether it be important birthdays, my going away to college or my graduation, each one involved his nailing my character a bit too wittily for comfort using his skills as both draughtsman and wordsmith.

Like other thrifty Mums during the 1970s, mine loved making me long party dresses out of what I can only assume was surplus furnishing material. I hated every single one of them. Only slightly less than the parties that, equally, I hated going to. In the photos where I’m not literally blending into the curtains, I can be seen smiling in a distinctly forced way. She taught me how to sew my first project when I was about eight, a hand-crafted pair of striped pyjamas for my favourite teddy bear. As I pushed into the 1980s, whilst my sewing skills improved, my street cred was at an all-time low.

With creativity on display all around me, it would have felt churlish not to get involved career-wise.

In high school it quickly transpired that I had an ear for languages, so I felt my further education choices were to either follow this route or get a visual arts qualification. Plan A was to do a degree in Russian, join the British Intelligence service, and live a life of espionage. Plan B involved doing a degree in graphic design, joining a studio which had Herman Miller chairs, and becoming the next April Greiman.

Plan A was ditched when the Berlin Wall fell. It was now full steam ahead with plan B.

I successfully applied to Ravensbourne College of Design and Communication in London and having achieved a first-class BA (Hons), I then found my first job with company number one. It was there that I learned some crucial skills that every designer needs.

Firstly, the ability to manage one’s time. It quickly became apparent that in the real world, budgets mean a designer has a day to come up with ideas and some layout options for a basic brief, not the leisurely four weeks I had experienced as a design student. Secondly, accuracy. The weeks I’d spent editing my 10,000-word college dissertation pontificating as to whether Joel-Peter Witkins’ body of work is blasphemous p*rnography or misunderstood art, proved invaluable for noticing typos in badly supplied body copy. Thirdly, recognise when things aren’t working. When company number one merged with a major UK corporate, I somewhat drunkenly asked the newly appointed CEO at the celebrations whether his extravagantly salaried new team was going to turn the business into a rather large white elephant. Unbeknown to me at the time, it transpired that this third skill was operating at a much higher level than my ability to respectfully deal with those above my pay grade. Which brings me to skill number four; hone your people skills.

Skill number three proved accurate. When said white elephant started to trumpet loudly, I took voluntary redundancy, banked the cash, and laughed in the face of the colleague who said, “are you sure you want to do this?”

I enjoyed the next two years working in company number two, a small marketing firm. The owner was a charming ex-military man whose experience of diplomacy and timekeeping ensured that clients were kept happy. His daily attire of brogues and Harris Tweed jacket served to teach me skill number five; if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

My creative director was a kind and patient man who never raised his voice. A weekend spent with him sanding decades of paint from the Regency period floorboards, with only tea and sandwiches by way of recompense, taught me skills number six and seven; namely you only get out what you put in and you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

After a couple of years my feet were starting to itch again, and it felt as though I needed to take a risk. I gave up the lease on my apartment, packed my Pantone swatch and used part of the money I’d banked from company number one to buy a plane ticket to Sydney. The rest was used to fund some time off when I got there. For a few months I put up with the hell of endless sunshine, fabulous food and time spent exploring the world’s fourth most liveable city.

Eventually my work ethic kicked back in (ie, my funds ran out). I freelanced for a while before landing a job in company number three on Sydney’s North Shore, a studio with NSW Lotteries, UnitingCare and Tourism Australia as clients. I worked there for four years as part of a great team and was lucky enough to have two bosses who would leave early on Friday afternoons in full knowledge that we would stop working, raid the beer fridge and dance to the jacked-up sounds of Groove Armada.

However, that also came to an end when I fell for a like-minded creative who had a shabby old land Rover, a fluffy kelpie called Mr Bear and mottled green eyes that I found impossible to resist.

Not wanting to spurn Cupid’s arrow at this delicate age, I agreed to move to Perth with him, where he had signed a more lucrative work contract. Once more, I handed in my notice and we drove west, arriving two weeks later in the most isolated capital city in the world. Here we settled down, bought and partly renovated a house, and made a baby. We replaced the dog when the old one broke.

Once our son made it clear that he wanted to spend less time cooing with Mummy and more time expanding his brain, I freelanced for design company number four. Sadly, this closed when the owner became ill.

It was at this point I remembered a piece of advice that one of my ex-bosses in Sydney had given me when I left. Not the legendary “when answering the phone to potential clients, the soothing cadence of flight safety instructions being announced is always preferable to manic Valley Girl upspeak”. (That quote may have been embellished.) The actual advice he gave me was that I may get more creative satisfaction if I were to approach publishers as a freelance book designer, rather than joining another studio where end clients would undoubtedly ask whether “the logo could be a bit bigger”. I took his advice and am enormously grateful that the two publishers I approached took a chance on me. I find myself in the enviable position of having been a home-based freelance book designer ever since.

If the above display of over indulgence hasn’t put you off, please get in touch via my contact form to see how I might help you envision your literary ambitions.