Some jobs stick in the mind, and this one popped up in a local secondhand bookshop recently to jolt me back to 1980. Most of my work at the Peak District National Park where I worked then was day to day stuff designed to do a job. I kept samples of all the leaflets I did for years but when the Park was hammered by Tory budget cuts some years ago they had to close the place I worked in then down, made everyone redundant and threw all the office files in a skip (making the staff do that before they were sacked). I gathered there was no intention to keep an archive so I binned my samples as well.
But this 80 page book was a bit more important as it was going to be more widely published and needed to look good. It was written by Nic Broomhead who was one of a couple of full time photographers working for the park authority. Nic was researching this long abandoned mining railway as a bit of a hobby and as the remains were scheduled and important nationally, he persuaded the Park to fund the book and I persuaded him or he asked (I can’t recall!) me to design it. They both probably regretted it, because for a modest A5 book I pushed the edges a bit. First I went for a horizontal format on the grounds that most of the photographs were this shape, and it seemed silly not to make best use of them. Then there were a number of vintage newspaper cuttings reproduced, so I designed these to appear on newsprint rather than the gloss of the rest of the book. I bet the printer loved that! I might even have added a couple of pages on tracing paper, I’d have to check. The artwork was done on board full size, all the text was typeset locally then cut out and pasted up on a drawing board. I kept the cover design simple, using a superb hand coloured shot of one of the locomotives, and adding the title between two ‘rails’ …
Because railway buffs are like that, copies of this can still be found on any number of book sites for sale now, starting at a magnificent £1.39p I notice.
easyontheeye2.wordpress.com 