Curriculum Vitae

I was reading a post on Medium earlier about what being a graphic artist meant before the days of desktop publishing software and Photoshop, let alone AI. The writer pointed out the broad variety of physical training, skills, experience and equipment required simply to do the most basic of design tasks. First and foremost was the necessity of possessing the actual ability to draw and paint: the fundamentals. All other techniques flowed from that underpinning. Since the advent of widespread computing power and the software to exploit it, new skill sets have grown up around it, transforming both the industry itself and its practitioners' praxis within the industry.

I was minded about the type of school I attended at secondary level, and the subjects that were central to its curriculum, particularly in the pre-streamed first two years there. Ours was a technical school when I first started, and didn't start transforming itself into a more mainstream grammar school until I'd got into the third year, although the writing was on the wall to that effect in the couple of years before I went there. In short, the original aim of Lordswood Boys' School was to turn out students fitted to become engineers via a suitable tertiary education, either through a technical college or a university degree.

We were schooled in technical drawing, general science, mathematics, wood and metal working, principally, and in the earliest years of the school pure mechanics was routinely taught, although by the time I attended that had ceased to be an independent subject. One thing that marked out our school as engineering-biassed was the modern language that we were taught. Whilst pretty much every other secondary school in the midlands taught French, we had German: a prerequisite in those long-gone days for working in mathematics and engineering particularly. I'm grateful for the skills I garnered there, even though no career in engineering ensued for me; however, as a basis for getting through life? Invaluable...