It’s always weird looking back through these books.
Like looking at those insects trapped in a chunk of amber. 
There they were, right in the middle doing something, simply walking or picking their nose, frozen in time.
These books are a bit like that, a snapshot of what was happening at a certain moment in time, captured chronologically.
(Encased in green this time, not amber.)
This moment is ’93 to ’94, type & graphics, and what an odd moment it is too.
Starting with classically crafted pages ripped from Fred Woodward’s Rolling Stone and Fabien Baron’s Harper’s Bazaar.
Ending, little more than 12 months later, with the scruffy, deconstructed mess that was David Carson’s Ray Gun & Surfer magazines, Tibor Kalman’s Interview and the output of Tomato Design.
What a shift in aesthetic over such a short time?
A complete 180 degrees.
But we ate it up, especially in London, even the older art directors, like my mate Derrick Hass.
Every so often I’d be sitting in my office only to hear ‘WOW!’, I’d look up to see Derrick, like a kid after too many fizzy drinks, holding up one of these odd-looking, totally unreadable layouts.
Layouts, I might add, that were totally against everything he’d believed in for the previous ninety five years.
I’m not knocking him, I was the same, swept up by this exciting, new and progressive style.
It was the way forward, who said words had to be legible anyway?
Only squares and dullards; wankers!
Looking at this stuff now, it’s hard to see why were we all so intoxicated.
Your enjoyment of these magazine pages will be interrupted advertising, stuff I’d created and Chris & Mark had rejected (Simons Palmer (Denton Clemmow & Johnson).
Also by some ephemera from the period, like two ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ tickets (from Gaumont Cinema), there’s a flattened pack of Death Cigarettes and a handful of semi-cool skateboard stickers.
There’s also a bunch of alphabets photocopied from a Monotype specimen book. (Jesus those old photocopiers were shit!)
Presumably, I must’ve been convinced that these bits and pieces were crucial to the development of my career, sellotaping them into a book for speedy access.
So, here you go, be my guest.
(A £5 prize goes to anyone finding a use for those ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ tickets.)