For a couple of years now, I’ve been doing the posters for all the kids’ shows at The Court Theatre (about four a year). It’s a fun little illustration job that brings with it its own challenges, and over time I’d like to think I’ve got pretty good at it, so I thought I’d detail a bit of my process in case anyone was interested in that sort of thing.

Three interface designers are sitting around trying to use a Blackberry.

Sounds like the start of a joke, right? Well, kind of.

I’m a sucker for a good kung fu movie, and one that sticks in my head (although it’s not actually necessarily a good kung fu movie) is Jackie Chan’s Half a Loaf of Kung Fu. In it, Jackie Chan starts off as a wandering kung fu wannabe, with no actual moves. He meets a flatulent beggar (!) who teaches him a move called the ‘Iron Finger’ in return for some bread; but then, when he tries to use the Iron Finger in a fight, he’s bested by another move known as the ‘Concubine’. So he learns the Concubine, only to be beaten by ‘Bow to the King’, and so on. Each time the moves get trickier and trickier, and each time the next person he fights is able to trump him with a move he can’t block.

In some ways, that’s what design feels like to me sometimes…

When I was 16 or 17, I remember smuggling books into class and reading them under the desk in boring classes: usually the ones I was ‘forced’ into doing because my school didn’t have enough people who wanted to do final-year drama as a subject to justify a drama class, so the two of us got to do ‘Art Design’ instead. We didn’t actually get put in a design class, either, just stuck in the back of Miss Boyd’s print-making room and left to our own devices, which probably explains how I ended up getting a C in design.

Anyway. One of the books I remember reading in such a clandestine fashion was Molly Holzschlag’s Guide to Designing with Stylesheets, Tables, and Frames, which must have been very new out then, and was really my introduction to the crazy new world of web design. Back then, we didn’t even have an internet connection at home, but that didn’t stop me fantasising about, and endlessly redesigning, my own personal web page.