The odds and ends of design

There’s a wide range of designed material with which we can make an impact. Unless you are a professional designer you are unlikely to win a commission to design the packaging for a commercial product, but it’s quite possible that, if you are known to have a computer and design software, you may be asked to produce something for a local event, give some pro bono assistance or just create designs in your day to day work at the office.

The point is that we are all instantly affected by the visual experiences we see around us, and a graphic of some sort or another is known to be an immediate way of making an impact or getting a message across. This attitude, incidentally, is at the root of many of the unmemorable presentations we are all subjected to, though it has to be said that presenters have much to do with the problem. Lack of training seem to deter nobody. Somehow it is felt that by using a computer a professional design will automatically be produced. In fact there is so much design around that it’s difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff – particularly as, in Britain, we don’t receive a good visual education. But that’s another story…

Sometimes during this process studies are made of a particular design interest or problem and which illustrate something which might be developed later. These drawings, which illustrate different characters of geometric patterning, are of – from left to right:

• an Arabic grille, or mushrabiya
• a Celtic design, and a
• cosmatesque design,

all of which were created while investigating patterns associated with Islamic studies. The musharabiya is a very strong, traditional design, here based on ten-point geometry. While carrying out research on Arabic geometric design, I was also looking at other cultures and their geometries, in the case of Celtic – in the middle – with a view to comparing and contrasting the different structures. The pattern on the right is a cosmatesque design and was drawn for comparison with the two geometries adjacent to it. This latter type of patterning, originating near Rome, exists in England only in the pavements inside Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.

These three patterns are part of a hand-drawn study series I made on Arabic/Islamic geometries quite a time ago. The drawings were developed with only a compass and straight edge in order to explore the manner in which I have seen craftsmen setting out their designs on gypsum panels before carving them. The three are also all based on ten-point geometry which, as I’ve explained here, relates to the Golden Section, a relationship considered to demonstrate a perfect proportion, and one which is found in many Islamic geometric designs.

I have placed the central pattern here in order to show the even grid on which a variety of patterns can be developed. The top and bottom studies were investigations into two door panels, and are relatively common patterns in the Islamic world. The studies looked at the variety of patterns that can be developed from similar geometries. Here I have illustrated only two-dimensional line patterns, but they can be seen to be quite different from each other. When coloured in as they would be in Islamic tilework, there are an infinite number of ways they can be presented.

While investigating geometrical patterns some time ago I made a small example of patterning using coloured ribbons. The exercise was never made into a more worked example, but this small item sits pinned to my pinboard where it has been ignored for years. It is yet another example of a quick design investigation which has yet to bear the fruit of development into a finished design or something of practical use.

Every now and again I come across work I executed a long time ago and that has been set aside, lost or misplaced, and not seen for years. This study is one such drawing I must have made thirty or more years ago but it reminded me that it was a study for a woodcut I later made. I recall that it was the basis of a series of greeting cards, each different by the way in which the block was inked. But this was an original sketch that was eventually used as a basis both for the wood blocks as well as printed designs. The reason it is here is not because it has any great merit but because it reminds me of the days when drawings were made by hand. I know this was not the only drawing I made as it is unfinished, at least one other drawing having colour and shading added to it. I suspect it was carried out by drawing in pencil and then going over the lines with a Rapidograph pen, a favourite method in those days, though I also used calligraphic pens to give character to lines. Note how boring the even line of the pen is here. The only copy of the woodcut I have is added for comparison. Each print was different both in colour, in the number added to the print, and to their positioning on the print.

From time to time there is a need to produce a quick design for one reason or another. Here a pair of crossed pencils was quickly drawn for a small project. The perspective is not correct, but it met the need. To the right, an A4 cover was needed for a report about the State of Qatar in the Arabian Gulf. It’s unusual coastline, similar to the outline of a hand and linked to a sloping coastline of Saudi Arabia, suggested the staggered, overlapping design with the colours being an approximation of the colours of sand and sea.

And, to the right, are three examples of visiting cards, proving the rule that a designer really shouldn’t work for himself or, perhaps more accurately, he really should know when it’s time to stop. They are all completely over-designed and not at all good of their sort. The good news is that none of them was used because at least I recognised they were poor. I really must have another go at it…

On the right of the three visiting cards is a design based on my signature in Arabic. It is not ’proper’ Arabic writing or calligraphy but is a version of my signature based on the ’tughra’ – a stylised form of calligraphy where the artist is permitted considerably more latitude than there is in the rules of basic calligraphy. It is a design which catches an Arab’s eye, but perhaps not for the right reasons. There’s a larger version of it below, right.

And here to the right is yet another visiting card, quickly made and relating to this site. I prefer it to the others in that it’s simpler and has better proportions, being based on the Golden Section. Looking at it now I can see that it can – and needs to be – amended.

Here, to the left, is a sketch design made to illustrate a children's story relating to an old diary. It’s useful to make quick sketches to see if you are working on the right lines. A version of this would have been developed as a frontispiece to the book. To the right of it is a version of the same piece of calligraphy you can see a little further up the page as a visiting card. I struggle with this particular design from time to time knowing more or less what I want to do with it but never quite being able to get exactly what I want out of it. I think it works well as a hand-drawn piece of calligraphy but not so well when formalised.

And this design, to the right, is the latest formal version of it complete with vowelling – the diacritics – but is nowhere as attractive as the tughras produced by the Ottoman empire where the rulers used their tughras as seals, the design having a legal resonance on official documents. This version of the design is getting a little nearer what I want to create, but I think it still has a long way to go in terms of the geometry of the different curves.

It is not easy to work Arabic calligraphic designs without a thorough understanding of the rules governing them. I admit that I don’t have this knowledge but it still fascinates me enough to persist in attempting to produce simple designs of the character shown here. This may not be correct but it has a balance that appeals to me. I shall continue to work on it and see if I can improve it. The design is based on the two characters jeem and lam, though I have to admit it appears to be more like jeem and kaf.

So here is another simplistic attempt at the same two letters, this time drawing the lam a little more accurately. As a general rule there is considerable latitude allowed in artistic interpretation but, at the back of a calligrapher’s mind there are rules that take years to learn and not readily set aside. The benefit to me is that I don’t know the rules and have more latitude than I should. In this study I have made the letters heavier by significantly altering their proportion. Again, this is a study that should take far more time than I have put into it. Studies such as this deserve better.

This design is based on something I saw and that appealed to me. Designers often find their inspiration from designs that catch their eye and, with a massive amount of work available to us daily, it is difficult not to be affected by other people’s work, either consciously or subconsciously. Here a simple Arabic greeting, eid mubarak, has been repeated and coloured to provide what I hope is an interesting pattern. The work should be seen at a larger scale than is illustrated here as it’s designed to decorate a card. Again, more work is required to produce the optimal relationship between the different lines.

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Kufic and other patterns

This piece of artwork was executed a long time ago. Although it is no longer in my possession I came across this photo of it and thought it useful to include as it provides a contrast with the later, computer-generated work. It reminds me of the concentration required to produce mistake-free artworks, and the degree of manual dexterity needed in those days. I would still recommend it as an exercise at it puts you far more in harmony with the design than does computer-aided design work.

The design consists of four paragraphs from the Holy Quran, set in kufic forms, and drawn using four different styles. There is a semblance of geometrical design superimposed on top of it that I think was there to establish a basic setting out for the four panels, but the whole design is really a graphic design exercise.

As with all my work at that time, the study was made using a pair of compasses holding a fine blue pen, and slightly thicker pens and straight edges for the calligraphy. To give a sense of scale, the paper on which the design is made would have been 210mm square, the width of a sheet of A4 paper. On a technical note, you have to take great care not to make large holes in the paper with your compasses.

To continue, here is a study in kufic design, shown in these first five graphics. The basic pattern was designed with the specific intent of producing a small square from the phrase ‘Islamic art’, one that might be used to create, by repetition, a running band as a frame or border. It is composed of four pairs of words, each pair at right angles to the one preceding it, and the second word comprising of four shapes, excluding the diacritics or dots.

In the second of these five illustrations are three graphic studies that may give some indication of the difficulties experienced in attempting to find symmetrical solutions to this character of design. Note how there are significant differences in pattern in each study, though all have strong overall shapes.

With simple patterns such as this the skill lies in forming the words so they are as accurate a reflection of the written word as possible – and are still legible, of course – as well as ensuring that there is as little free space left within the design as possible. In the left graphic in the first illustration above you can see that I was not able to accomplish this, and left spaces in the four corners of the design in my attempt to make the lettering relatively accurate. I then decided to fill the empty spaces by curving back the tail of the letter ‘y’ which wraps around and into this space. You can see the revised study illustrated in the right graphic in the first illustration and, larger, here to the side with a drop shadow added to enliven the design. The other issue I had with this design was in not being able to start the first word where I wanted, but having to locate it towards the centre of the design rather than at the edge as I wished. I shall have to look at the design again and see what I can improve.

The third and fourth illustrations show the graphic extended as alternative versions of the border or frame that I first intended. These two different treatments, even at the reduced scale illustrated here, show how small decisions can have a dramatic effect on the outcome of a design. It is sensible to repeat that this study, and most of the others on this page, are simplistic and obviously not the work of an Arabic calligrapher.

Calligraphic scripts in Arabic are required to conform with sets of precise rules in the execution of their manuscript form. But some of the most beautiful examples of calligraphy have stretched these rules, and this is certainly true of the work of many of the designers of modern Arabic calligraphy. Traditionally, calligraphers learn their craft formally over several years and, of course, continue to learn and develop those skills over time with practice and experience. The skills they are required to employ are both mechanical as well as artistic, and it is fascinating to watch calligraphers at work as they think through and execute their work. In contrast to the work of those skilled designers, the studies that are set out here, though, are very different in their design quality.

Kufic script has interested me for some time now, particularly in its cubic, three-dimensional form which has so much in common with architecture. Here are two studies based on the first part of the shahada where the Kufic letterforms have been used to produce a building-like structure, one that could, in theory, be constructed. The first is deliberately designed as a continuing tower, the second as a regular cube. They both consist, in effect, of two-dimensional letterforms, given depth and then used on a three-dimensional form. So far I have not been able to design them as true three-dimensional constructions but, from time to time, I have another attempt to think it through.

This illustration just reads ‘Islamic art’ and was designed to be used at a larger scale as, at this scale, it is not as legible as it might be. It was also designed as a two dimensional pattern to be placed on the surfaces of a cube rather than being, as the other ones tend to be, three-dimensional lettering more integrated with the cube. Again, the work was investigative, the main process I use in an attempt to improve my studies, and it tells me that there is more work to do in order to benefit this character of design.

These two examples are similar to those above. They are essentially the same design using a Kufic form in two-dimensions, but I have formed the top one as a hollow cube, the lower as a solid. In many ways these are the type of exercise that used to be common in design schools of various sorts. They make you think about three-dimensional forms and the spaces in and around them. It would be more interesting if I could get the design elements to interlock, but I have not yet been able to do so. I find this type of work fascinating and have used it from time to time in greeting cards such as this example, again using the phrase ‘eid mubarak’, where the design has been constructed in the form of a maze, a design which lends itself to the laying out of a real maze or, perhaps, a parterre ’ although these are usually symmetrical about a central or cruciform axis.

The Kufic form of the design above, as well as these next two objects to the side, also bear strong resemblance to a simple wooden building toy I designed many years ago, and which is illustrated on a later page of this section. This form of design can also be a good student activity or exercise, enabling conceptual spaces to be investigated within a pre-determined or self-specified series of rules, either as blocks or as spaces. In both cases the designed objects can be considered as sculpture at whatever scale is thought appropriate; they may be considered as small objects that can be held in the hand, climbing frames for children, or as urban landscapes. Oddly, I have never tried this with Roman letters; perhaps that is something I should look at next.

In this case the rules specified relate to the selection of the Kufic letters and their repetition over a six-sided cube which introduces the problems of whether or not to employ reflection: in this case there is only rotation. There is more information on patterns here on the Islamic geometry page.

This is a much simpler design executed in a simplified Kufic form with the greeting ‘Eid Mubarak’ repeated four times around the centre, and the letters projected. Projection or dropped shadows are an easy way to lift a graphic off the page by giving a sense of realism to it. These are not difficult to design, the hardest part is producing the Kufic form of the letters as accurately as possible.

The benefit of this kind of exercise is that it forces the designer to think in three-dimensions and develop solutions to problems of his or her own making, an exercise faced by all designers working in both two and three dimensions. It may be a truism but designs which are inherently and internally consistent tend to be more coherent whether they are easily understood or not. In a sense it can be seen to be similar to the coherence which comes with the underlying geometry of Islamic designs. What I enjoy about this form of design is that the problems are all self-imposed though there are rules to be obeyed in the way the characters are constructed. In my case I’ve I tend to take a non-Arabic view of the forms which purists will think wrong.

Finally a variation of the exercises shown above. This graphic was developed as a design for a water feature in an Islamic garden. In fact it needs more work in order to join up the three pools, and I think that the narrow gaps would collect rubbish, another reason to reconsider it. But it is placed here to illustrate another way in which calligraphy can be adapted to a different design discipline. Using Kufic calligraphy the design spells out the phrase ‘The universe belongs to Allah’ and was thought a suitable phrase for a landscaping water feature such as this.

Contrasting with the ‘Eid mubarak’ graphic just above is this design, again wishing ‘Eid mubarak’ to its recipient, but in a more normal manner. Designed to fit onto a standard card size there is sufficient space around it to allow it to float on the card. Both outlining and drop shadows are used to create a more complex design from the simple Arabic Naskh lettering.

These next three pairs of graphic studies are for the beginning of Ramadhan when ‘Ramadhan kareem’ is wished to Muslims. The lettering is the same in each of the two roundels of the first illustration, and similar in character to the preceding ‘Eid mubarak’ graphic. Note that the design on the left looks to have larger lettering against the simpler background compared with that on the right, and perhaps that the latter design appears to be overly complex due to its background.

The second of the three designs shows two kufic style illustrations of the same phrase testing alternative ways of grouping the phrase on a four-fold design. Neither of the two designs is yet fixed but will be worked on for the next time Ramadhan comes around when I suspect that I shall have the lettering of the first example sitting on a geometric pattern or a design based on a moon and stars theme, and the second developed, perhaps, as a three-dimensional graphic. The third of the three designs shows another way of achieving a more interesting illustration, though one which adds complexity at the expense of legibility. The graphic on the left is the basic design sitting on three copies, each rotated at 22.5° with the second graphic exactly the same, but with each layer having 50% transparency. Although they are slightly more legible at a larger scale, an alternative way of improving legibility would be to make the different layers slightly different in colour.

Utilising the same principles that enabled me to create many of the three-dimensional kufic graphic effects on this page, here are two more variations of the two-dimensional ‘Ramadhan karim’ greeting made above, this time developed into three-dimensional figures. In the first of the two illustrations the two-dimensional graphic has been given a depth equivalent to the stroke, and six of them have been joined to form the faces of a cube. In the second example, I have inserted a transparent cube inside the six faces in order to give a little better legibility to the surrounding graphics. Whatever design I eventually decide on, it should be suited to a standard card size, although the two-dimensional graphics above are best suited to a square format.

A little further up this page there are a number of studies based on the greeting made to people at the time of the ‘Eid holidays, and that is ‘Eid mubarak’. This study is similar but wishes the reader instead, ‘Eid sa’id’ or, literally, ‘Happy Eid’, a slightly different way of greeting at these festive times of the year. The design is a simple form based on an Arabic calligraphic script reading in from the right and rotated five times, this being considered to produce a more active figure – odd numbered figures appearing more mobile than even-numbered figures. The lettering appears on a simple ground with the effect of being cut out. Again, the colour selected for this graphic relating to a holy time of the year, is a pale green. While I have experimented with other colours, or have introduced more than one colour in designs such as this, they never seem to work satisfactorily even if confined to the green, blue and yellow ranges. Unusually for me, the card is square in format, the shape selected to produce a solid visual base to the more active graphic.

The previous study is based on the traditional ‘Eid holiday greeting, ‘Eid sa’id’ and using a cursive calligraphy. The following rough studies are of the common greeting made at the beginning of the Islamic New Year, ‘kull ’aam wa antum bikhair’ and are based on a kufic style used above. There is also a common alternative greeting, ‘kull al-sana wa anta tayyib’ which I also mean to try out. These first two illustrations show four ways in which the words of the greeting might be rotated in order to create a degree of symmetry. They are here to show that this kind of work is not easy.

The first illustration shows two ways in which the phrase may be used twice, rotated once at 180°. The original intent was to find ways in which the phrase might be enclosed within a square leaving little or no blank spaces. As you can see, in the example on the left it was not successful so an attempt was made to create a more strongly defined square, but this time only a little more successfully, the intention being to have a secondary illustration in the centre or, alternatively, to have the letters ‘alif’ and ‘lam’ extended and intertwined to fill the space there.

This second illustration shows two ways in which the phrase may be used four times, rotated three times at 90°. It was realised that this was even less likely to produce the square frame originally sought, but it was thought that a shape might be created which would lend itself to being repeatable in a geometric pattern. Interest in these patterns is created by having as irregular shape as possible, trying to ensure that the positive lettering will fit into the negative blank spaces surrounding the lettering.

There are, however, dangers in creating shapes which knit together too accurately. These next two examples are based on the example above on the right, and are not particularly tight. It is easy to see how the shape of each group of phrases – in effect, a tile – is almost lost in repetition in the first example here, though there is a discernible shape created by the blank spaces which gives the pattern a degree of scale. The second example uses the same pattern or tile, but draws the tiles a little further away from each other in order to create a more individual pattern by virtue of the shapes created by the blank spaces between tiles. Notice how the apparent scale of the design is affected by the distance to which the tiles are drawn apart. Another way to bring out the separate tiles, assuming this might be desired, would be to use colour or tone to do so.

This design is based on the left example above and forms a strong square pattern of blank space in the tiling. You may also notice in both examples, but perhaps more strongly in this design, that the pattern appears to tilt slightly down to the left. This is an optical illusion apparently created by the relationships of overlap in the horizontal and vertical directions.

These are, as I wrote earlier, exploratory sketches. I hope to continue working on them in order to produce a better quality design.

Moving away from the Arabic forms above this is a much earlier graphic originally intended for this web site. The hand with the pen was deliberately juxtaposed with a non-calligraphic font, but the result was weak and went unused. It’s an interesting exercise to look back on things that did not work or went wrong, and to try to try to work out how you might improve on them.

Here is a quick study made with a drawing programme to see how a particular effect can best be carried out. What I learned is that there are considerable problems if you use anything simpler than the simplest of rings – which is not what it says on the tin… There are, of course, programmes designed specifically to make this effect more readily. I also find the lack of a proper perspective slightly disturbing, though this can be readily amended.

These two illustrations are of a draftsman working on a traditional drawing board. The illustration was made many years ago and has been used at the head of my pages on this web site since 2005. Originally the illustration headed an in-house poster and flier, illustrated below. The two images, one a line drawing, the other coloured, indicate something of the range of character that can be obtained with a single design.

These next four illustrations were made a number of years ago and are really here so that I can see them again having come across two of them accidentally. On the left of the first pair is a design that was requested within hours in order that the director might have something to present to a meeting. There is a related example on the corporate page. The camel design was made around thirty years ago as a quick sketch that I have been meaning to develop but, again, never got round to it. As you can see, it was not drawn on a computer but with a technical pen which was then outlined with a marker pen, the overlapping lines being a feature of using that kind of spirit-based ink.

This notional fish was drawn for a greeting card design and had words associated with it that have not been included here. The sketch of the partridge in a pear tree was used as a Christmas card. There is a note on its development on the greeting cards page. The idea of the twelve days of Christmas sparked the idea for a number of designs for the different days that were produced for the next year.

Here is another small illustration drawn with the intent of using it on that part of my site dealing with architecture and planning in the State of Qatar. Drawn in Illustrator and developed in Photoshop it was to have been used in a square format as a marker for a redesign of the site. In the event the redesign has not progressed and, coming across this the other day, I thought it might as well see the light of day in this section if it was unlikely to be used where originally intended.

Here are three drawings of a traditional Arabic house. The top drawing is a standard way of exploring and demonstrating the construction of a house showing it cut away to permit us to see the elements of the contruction. It is not a technical drawing in the sense that it is not an accurate, scaled representation of an existing building, but it has an accuracy which implies it is. However, it’s purely illustrative. The original was A4 size and a slightly larger version than the one above can be found on the Gulf architecture – page 3 page.

The sketch to the right explores a different character of the construction of the same kind of traditional building. In a sense it looks more realistic due to the use of shadows though I can see now that I have too many roofing poles projecting from the building. The infill panels are deliberately left out, and the sketch looks at the way light falls across this traditional construction. Like the sketch above, this drawing is also reduced from its original A4 size. The purpose of this kind of drawing is to explore the way light falls on the building, compared with that above which examines its construction.

The first of the two sketches above was made a little while ago when I was investigating the manner in which traditional Arabic houses might have been constructed. Drawn in Illustrator it was made without a great deal of thought at the outset but would have benefited from more consideration. The second of the two was drawn in SketchUp, a drawing programme permitting three-dimensional sketches to be made easily, the great advantage being that it is possible to zoom in and out as well as examine the object from any angle. Again, the drawing would have benefited from more consideration before I started but fulfilled its purpose at the time. A year later here is another illustration of a similar building made with more forethought. Its great advantage in terms of illustration is that any element of the construction can be examined by zooming in. Provided that the drawing of each element is accurately drawn the object can be used for a variety of illustrative purposes. Another view of the same object can be found here, and there are smaller illustrations taken from it further down that page.

For a long time I have had an interest in the history of housing in the Arabian Gulf. It has been relatively easy to produce simple diagrams which, while not necessarily accurate, give a flavour of the accompanying discussion. Here a traditional Bedu tent is divided into the main, men’s area, and the women’s to the left. It might have been better to add the guy ropes and poles to give a more realistic appearance, but with the illustrations intended to be relatively small, they were omitted.

To the right is a notional illustration of a desert development which has developed over a period of time. The sketch is one of a series starting with the Bedu encampment above it and ending with this illustration demonstrating notional change over time. Again, the illustration is very much stylised, with a lot of detail omitted, the concentration being on the massing of spaces and their development from tent to stone and mortar construction, and the view selected to show optimal detail. I should add that neither this nor that above were drawn with specialist software.

The drawing was made in an illustrating programme, the perspective being set up on a separate layer to help establish a reasonable view of the compound. For simple drawings I like this kind of programme though there is at least one application which makes sketching in perspective relatively easy. It was used in the illustration above that shows shadows cast on the face of the building.

I have always been fascinated in the relationship between two- and three-dimensional forms and that has developed my interest in origami. Though this piece to the right is not origami as such, it is composed from squares each folded from a single white square of paper. The work is a study for a larger piece – actually the same sized squares of about 3 inches a side each – but intended to be eight by thirteen in arrangement based on a development of Fibonacci. It developed from the work on Islamic geometric patterning and the reflective effect is has on the viewer. I find that even this simple study has a soothing effect when looked at, and it’s only a lack of wall space which has stopped me completing it. Unfortunately the effect can’t be read at this scale.

Having made the study for the above arrangement, it struck me that it should be possible to use the principle of folding to take the place of quilting, in that the many folds used to create the pattern would also trap air and this, combined with the multiple thicknesses, might be an effective sort of quilt – though not technically a quilt, of course. As always, if you have an idea, mock something up to test the idea. Here, two pieces of square calico have been used to create the pattern, each finished approximately 50mm square, and have been roughly stitched together. At its thinnest the pattern is four layers thick. Created many years ago it has not been taken forward due to the massive amount of work that would be needed to complete even a small quilt. The only other result of the exercise I can recall was that I believe the squares should be twice the size in order to produce more accurate individual pieces. That has yet to be tested…

There are a number of really interesting studies based on origami tessellation which are much more interesting than this type of work. Anybody with an interest in geometrical studies would be well advised to seek them out, research and study them.

Although there are many designers and artist who use traditional, manual methods to carry out their work, most designers nowadays rely on computer based software to carry out their designs, particularly in order to be able to standardise and reproduce their products in multiple editions. The software used is generally based on their own computers, either personal or servers, but increasingly there are programmes on the Internet allowing those with an interest to create designs within a framework established by the software providers. There are inevitably restrictions in scope but, as a free service it is attractive to many. The illustrations here were created with the programme on such a site – though there are others, particularly the original of this type – which allow the user to input words within a framework that defines the overall shape, colour, font and orientation of the words. The first two images are based on words associated with this site, though I have had to amend the original images in order to get the design to fit the frame, something that could not be done within the programme. However, images created in this manner are large enough to adapt for uses such as the greeting card exercise shown in the lowest illustration, so are likely to be popular with many. As long as you have a printer it is possible to create a serviceable greeting card of reasonable design quality.

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Old studies

The following sketches are all very old, dating back to the 1960s and 70s. This first sketch was the head of a poster advertising an office party. The draftsman bears an obvious similarity with the sketch at the top of the housekeeping pages for this site, but the sketch was made as a visual pun on the camel being the ship of the desert. My apologies for the state of the drawing, it’s very old.

There was, in the 1960s, a strong revival of interest in old films. Looking at this illustration from all that time ago, I’m not sure which old film stars are illustrated but suspect they were from the era of silent films. There are a number of things I would change if I were to go through the exercise again, but that is usually the way with design. The drawing formed the basis for a New Year card. Drawn with black ink on tracing paper, it was printed in the old fashioned manner which all old architects would know, but not necessarily love. The second design was also executed in the same manner though I have no recollection of what it was for. I suspect it was a card, but why I should have selected this image, I have no idea other than the thought that there used to be an old advertisement for a mouth freshener which had two people suffering as they sat or stood each side of a person with the obvious problem.

Also in the 1960s there was a style of lettering that was found on posters and other graphic works all over the place. Relatively easy to draw, as it consisted of curvilinear forms, it was easy to produce letterforms suited to a number of uses. This illustration is of a part of a greetings card. It’s not very good, looked at now, forty-five years or so later, but I might well use the idea again, though hopefully improving upon it.

Drawn in the early 1970s, this quick, investigative sketch for a card was based on a common effect in the region. It was drawn after a visit to al-Khor when the phenomenon was first experienced as we approached the settlement from the desert. This illustration is only a part of the sketch and around twice life size which may account for the relatively poor draftsmanship. It’s here because I liked it and because it’s a reminder of days enjoyably spent in the desert.

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Student work

While some of the work on these pages may have been carried out in student days many years ago, these next few illustrations can definitely have come only from the early 1960s. I came across the old black and white photographs a little while ago while looking for something quite different; placing them here makes them more accessible than tucked away in a cupboard.

Perhaps it may be a mistake to show them as, again with the passing of time, there are not only a number of things I would do differently now, but it is difficult to understand some of the decisions made then. The model was made with the generous help of the Cumberland Pencil Company who, at my request, gave me two hundred cedar pencils without leads or covering paint. Regrettably this had an affect on the project as there were not enough pencils to compose the whole of the roof, as was the intent. Nor can I recall why it was I decided upon hexagons as the basic architectural vocabulary, the pencils obviously having an effect on the scale of the project. What I do remember, even as I type, and that is the wonderful smell of the cedarwood.

I regret that this is not a very good photograph, but it is the only one I have of this working model. The project was to look for a structural solution to housing the Cutty Sark which stood, and stands in its dry dock, at Greenwich, London. This design sought to create a solution which emulated the compression and tension found in the masts and rigging of the beautiful clipper. The heavy rods here are held in compression by tensile elements, impossible to see in the photograph. I still rather like this project and would have liked to develop the concept further.

At this distance in time, I am unable to recall much about this particular project, other than that it was a scheme for a new university in, I think, Ireland. This was a time that saw a number of new universities being designed and constructed around the country. I have the feeling that this scheme might have been a competition, but I’m really not sure.

The scheme was designed to be extendable with one wing housing all administration and associated functions, but the majority of the teaching elements being housed in the wing which had the laboratories on one side of an internal street and lecture, tutorial and staff rooms on the other side. I have no recollection of how the students and staff were to be accommodated. This photograph shows a little of the central administration complex with the first of the laboratories on the right and associated teaching facilities opposite. I see there was both clerestory lighting to the top floor of the laboratories and also peripheral lighting, and that there seems to be a servicing system below grade. What I remember most about this project, as well as other similar schemes – and the reason for its inclusion here – was the pleasure in constructing the models of balsawood, the lower photograph illustrating something of the character of the model.