David Hillman, D&AD Presidents Lecture

I recently wrote this post about the David Hillman Presidents lecture for the Thoughtful 6 blog.

Yesterday the Thoughtful Six took a trip down down to London to see David Hillman speaking at the D&AD Presidents Lecture at the Logan Hall. The talk was hosted by Patrick Baglee, who gave a quick overview of Hillman's career before welcoming David Hillman himself to the stage. The style of the lecture was quite informal, instead of David Hillman standing up and talking about his career he was seated with Patrick Baglee. The lecture took the form of a conversation between the two of them, covering Hillman's career over the past 50 years as they discussed his education at the London School of Print through to his work for the Sunday Times, Nova, Pentagram and the Guardian.

Being interested in editorial design from the start, Hillman discussed how this caused various conflicts between some of his tutors, because they mainly taught typography where he studied as opposed to editorial design. He described how he was shunned by one of his tutors until the tutor realised that he was doing well for himself and had quite a reputation, and therefore asked him back to give lectures to the students. This goes to show that although tutors are there to guide you and of course, their opinion counts, if there is an area you want to pursue and explore you shouldn't let anyone stop you. 

David discussed the work he did for The Guardian and talked about breaking ‘old boundaries’. He achieved this by reworking the paper so that text and images may appear above the masthead, something that had never been done before. At the time this caused quite a stir, with people stating that, ‘no self respecting newspaper designer would put anything above the masthead’, yet a few weeks later the same people had copied his style.

When talking about photo shoots, David made a point about capturing everything in camera. He showed examples of the work, and I found it quite hard to believe that the shots hadn’t been re-touched at all. The images were perfect, with the lighting and composition just right. This caught our attention because it is something that Thoughtful have been trying to get through to us, that when we are doing a photo shoot we should aim to get the perfect shot, without settling for ‘oh it’s alright, we can re-touch it later.’ 

A topic that we all found really interesting was when David discussed how he set up his own business, before joining Pentagram. This business only lasted for around a year, but during that time he learnt a lot about the politics of magazine design. With this in mind, it might be worthwhile thinking about starting a business sooner rather than later in order to learn what is necessary to function well in the industry we are in. If we have tried it out for ourselves, learning the rights and wrongs even if only for a year, it might give us that edge and extra understanding that is necessary to succeed when applying for a job. 

When asked what advice he would give to anyone wishing to set up on their own, he said to keep it small and work from home; buying a studio leads to unnecessary overheads that you can manage fine without.

Another topic of interest was David’s view on free pitching and how he has never done it. He stated his dislike to the way clients treat designers like suppliers with the mentality that they can ‘get it cheaper down the road.’ He voiced his opinion on this view with an anecdote concerning a designer asking the client “when you go to the doctor, do you tell him the symptoms or the cure?” The client replies, “the symptoms, of course.” The designer states, “exactly. So treat me with the same respect.”

David stated that a far better way of doing things would be for the client to build a relationship with the designer, so they can get know them and trust them to do a good job. This would result in the production of far better work. Free pitching also means that a lot of design time is lost in the struggle of trying to identify what the client wants, rather than engaging with the client directly and discovering what they actually need from the job. Maybe it is time that all designers made a stand? Unfortunately, in such a competitive market this seems unlikely to happen and even if it did it probably wouldn't be long before people started to give in.

We all really enjoyed listening to David talk about his career. With fifty years of experience behind him, 16 yellow pencils and two black pencils, he clearly knows what he is talking about and has some fantastic work to show for it. Listening to him talk about his own business and getting started in the design industry was really inspiring, as it is something that we ourselves will have to be thinking long and hard about in the not so distant future.