I Was Trade-Trained. That Changes How I See Design.

I didn’t come into design through a degree. I came into it through an apprenticeship, and if I’m honest, at the time I wasn’t thinking about career paths or creative identity. I was just trying to survive the week without having to redo the same job three times.

It was tough. Proper tough. Get it right or do it again. No one sat you down to explain the philosophy behind it. You just did the work. And if it wasn’t right, you did it again, and again, and again.

There were jobs that felt ridiculous at the time. Routing out tyres on the John Hughes newspaper car adverts with a scalpel. Years before I was trusted to actually do the wheels properly. I could do the rest of the car. That was fine. But the wheels were different. The wheels needed scalpel control. You didn’t get given that part just because you wanted it.

Back then I didn’t understand why I had to do what felt like the crap jobs first. I just knew that’s how it was. Now I can see what it did.

It burned the fundamentals into me so deeply they’re not something I consciously apply. They’re just there. How something is constructed. How it will reproduce. Where it might fall apart. You don’t get to skip that when you come through a trade.

I think being trade trained on a newspaper is also probably why I’m calm.

Newspaper work does that to you because deadlines don’t move. Pages change at the last minute. You adjust. You fix it. You move on. You don’t get dramatic about it, because the paper still has to print.

Panic wastes time. Process doesn’t.

Over the years I’ve watched the industry shift, and I’ve never really been comfortable with the gatekeeping side of it. I remember when we got our first desktop computer in the typesetting room. Just one. And only one typesetter was allowed to use it. She guarded it because it meant she got the best jobs. When she was away, the computer just sat there and the work stalled because no-one else knew how to use it.

That always felt wrong.

My old boss used to say to me, “If you get hit by a bus on the way home tonight, can someone else take over where you left off?”

It sounds brutal, but what he meant was simple. Your work shouldn’t rely on you being the only one who understands it. It should be structured properly. Clear. Logical. Transferable.

That idea stayed with me.

So when I went out on my own, I couldn’t understand why designers would withhold raw artwork from clients. Why build a system that forces someone to keep coming back for every small change? If a client leaves because you gave them their files, that’s not a file problem. That’s a relationship problem.

In a trade, knowledge gets passed down.

As soon as I moved up a year, a new first-year would arrive and it became my job to show them how things worked. The tricks. The shortcuts. The small efficiencies. None of that knowledge was treated like currency. It was just how the trade continued.

That’s probably why I don’t get precious about design. I don’t see it as mystical. I see it as practical. Technical. Built on basics that don’t really change, even if the tools do.

Designers who come through a trade background tend to approach things differently. 

We think about how it’s made. How it will reproduce. Where it might break. What happens when something goes wrong.

It’s not glamorous. But it’s solid.