I have a Tuesday morning in my mind. The sun has left us. All grass has turned to mud. I’m 15, heavily curly and my first class of the day is P.E. If it was a lovely summery day our Gym master (I never used this term, ever, but like it) would make us play basketball inside. But on such a gloriously depressing wet day…this called for football.
I wasn’t good at PE.
My excuse is that I took the music route through life, when everybody else was learning the ways of the sport, I enjoyed the A Minor scale on the Yamaha Electone HS4.
(This does eventually relate to design, do bare with me, if you are DESPERATE for some design, here is a link to some fonts) You really shouldn’t be reading our blog for design news.
I found myself in the middle of a muddy field in the cleanest sport shoes known to mankind. My dad had always told me to make myself muddy or everybody else would. I rubbed a bit of mud on my face. I stood there like a terrible drag Pocahontas.
Due to either a really cruel trick or some form of sportmanship, I ended with the ball of rugby. Unsure of the rules and rather determined to prove my masculinity, I just ran into some people.
Despite what I thought, this was inappropriate sport behaviour and I was sent off. I sat with the kids with PE excuse letters.
This was the end of doctor Adam (I briefly wanted to be a doctor)
The kids with excuse letters were all chaps doing GCSE art, they were fiddling away in sketch books, they had messy hair and smelt interesting, based on this alone, later I ticked the box saying GCSE GRAPHICS.
I adored GCSE graphics, my teacher came from planet ace. She pretty much didn’t give too much of a crap about anything else. Graphics was the way, she’d been in the industry, she showed me how to stretch paper, bought me a hardback sketchbook and most importantly got me out of PE class.
For those truly interested in graphics, who really worked hard, she would write notes to Gym master to excuse us from his class due to urgent design needs. I became one of those ‘cool’ arty chaps and began my voyage to bizarre.
So much was I inspired by her that later on, I briefly joined a teaching course to inspire others and get them into the path of design (and get them out of PE) – Alas teaching was not for me (another boring blog, for another day)
And here we are. Curlykale, powered by P.E. Gosh.
We’re not your typical designers. Our houses aren’t full of design books, we dont follow font weekly or attend colour conferences. Design runs deeper. As pretentious as it sounds, it’s actually our way of life, distilled in us all from a very early age, its our physiology, a way of thinking and behaving (that sounded terrible didn’t it!)
I’d love to hear your stories of PE. I briefly considered setting up some form of charity, we’d put banners up on school sport fields saying ‘I was crap at PE but have a really good job now’ – Possibly a bad / illegal idea