Let’s face it, we’re a pretty odd bunch.

How many of the following sound familiar?

 

1.The scent of permanent markers and Cow Gum makes you smile.

 

2.You’ve sliced off part of a finger whilst trimming an image.

 

3. And you know that blood stains on your presentation hurt more than any mere flesh wound.

 

4.You have lovingly stroked a GF Smith Sample catalogue.

And possibly drooled a little.

 

 

5.Your childhood was spent being simultaneously enchanted and frustrated by an Etch A Sketch.

You drew a lot of square houses and staircases.

Not many circles.

 

6.You can spot a dafont font at 50 paces.

 

7.You don’t download albums, you buy them the old school way so you can appreciate the artwork.

 

8.You judge a man on the card stock and print finish of his business card.

You question the credability of anyone presenting you with something by VistaPrint.

 

9.You hate yourself for it, but you slip design yuppie vocab into conversations.

‘Synergy’

‘Joined-up thinking’

‘Multifaceted response’

Cringe.

 

10.Grocery shopping is highly influenced by attractive packaging.

More often than not you cannot cook a simple meal, but your cupboards look awesome.

 

11.You stroke the wallpaper in restaurants and posh hotels to ascertain if it’s digitally or silk screen printed.

You are more impressed by the latter.

 

12.You laughed out loud at the Comic Sans monologue.

“While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen behind the woodshop.”

 

13.And Graphic Designer v Client secretly made you giggle (despite the expletives!)

 

14.You understand one of the simple joys in life is the sharp crispness of a brand new scalpel blade.

 

15.No matter how often your iPhone drops a call, your Time Capsule dies or you find software isn’t compatible with your mac, you’re Apple to the core.

 

16.You mock PC users.

 

17.You sent a picture to Hartbeat or Art Attack and watched religiously every week to see if you made it onto the gallery.

 

18.You secretly wished Tony Hart was your Grandad.

 

19.You hoard almost barren sheets of Letraset, even when the only characters left are Z, Q and the punctuation marks (when do you ever need to Letraset a comma?).

 

20. You frequently go entire days with paint, ink or carbon smudged on your face.

 

21. Your holiday destinations are determined by locations covered in Wallpaper* City Guides – you probably can’t afford to visit most of the spots they list, but they look beautiful on your bookcase.

 

22. You sharpen pencils with a knife.

Grrrrrrrrrr.

 

23. In the days before iPods, you spent just as much time on the artwork inlay of a mix tape as you did on song selection, order and the delicate art of record / pause.

 

24. You choose wine purely on the aesthetics of the label.

Forget grape and vintage, you are a connoisseur swayed by typography and spot varnish.

 

25. Your iPhone has at least one geeky photo app.

You love a filter.

 

26. Watercolour Challenge on Channel 4 was essential after school viewing – forget the Turner Prize, this was competitive art at its best.

 

27. You’ve found yourself standing in WHSmith fondling Moleskin notebooks.

And in Muji smooshing them against your face.

 

28. The words ‘Bitmap’ and ‘Clip Art’ make you shudder.

 

29. Your bookcases, music collection, pencil case or wardrobe are colour coordinated to flow from one colour into the next like a mega rainbow spectrum.

 

30. You own multiple rolls of adhesive tape, each for specific tasks.

Fat masking tape for screen printing.

Thin masking tape for stenciling.

Scotch tape for holding drawings together.

Cellotape for wrapping birthday presents…

 

31. You are wary of cheap, coloured erasers.

 

32.Your 2 year old nephew scribbles on a sheet of paper.

You can’t help but admire his free and expressive mark-making.

 

33. You refuse to throw away or recycle old design magazines.

Tattered stacks of Creative Review, Computer Arts Projects and Wallpaper* litter your home like an arty bonfire in-waiting.

 

34. The plastic smell of warm, sweaty Crayola Crayons reminds you of childhood.

 

35. You force feed yourself half a jar of pickled onions or 12 cups of coffee so you can use the empty jar for white spirits.

 

36. You have destroyed at least one pair of scissors by cutting double sided tape.

That stuff is so tacky, you could lay a patio with it.

 

37. You have spent serious time wishing there was the equivalent of Apple + Z for life.

 

38. You own a jar containing several years worth of used scalpel blades.

You are unsure of how exactly to go about disposing of these responsibly without maiming council workers or foxes.

 

39. You fear the Spinning Beach Ball of Death.

 

40. You’ve had a quiet little chuckle to yourself at Clients from Hell.

 

41.You’ve furiously cursed the eraser tool in Photoshop, only to discover that the unrelenting black dot on your image, is actually a grubby bit on your monitor.

 

42. You’ve seen Helvetica, the movie.

 

43. You’ve drawn on your Wacom pad with a Sharpie.

 

44. Or scribbled in your notebook with your Wacom stylus.

Double #Fail

 

45. You own at least one Pantone mug.

 

46. You have screamed “Nooooooooooooo!” at your computer as you realise, to your horror, that you have just flattened and saved your image.

 

47. You consider a paper cut an industrial injury.

 

48. You know that despite its somewhat suggestive domain, www.lovelypackage.com isn’t anything for a firewall to get flustered about.

 

49. You have inadvertently melted the inside of a photocopier by feeding it some bizarre or outlawed material, causing hundreds of pounds worth of damage and extreme inconvenience to other users.

 

50. A blob of orange plasticine will always remind you of a little guy named Morph.