Tat* is a bit of a graphic designer's curse. Walk into any design
studio and you will see tat pinned to the walls or placed with
loving care on top of a computer screen. Even the purist will have
a secret cache hidden away somewhere. Andy Altmann began collecting
tat while he was on his Foundation course, getting ready for an
interview at St Martins School of Art. He'd been asked to present a
sketchbook, but worried that he couldn't draw very well, he decided
to start a scrapbook: "I rummaged through the drawers at home and
found some football cards from the late 1960s and early '70s
(plenty of Georgie Best), an instruction leaflet from an old
Hoover, Christmas cracker jokes, and so on. Then I started on the
magazines, cutting out images of anything that interested me. And
finally I took myself off to the college library, where I
photocopied things from books before reaching for the scissors and
glue." It was the beginning of a significant collecting habit. So
what it is that makes a piece of graphic tat interesting? Is it the
'retro' thing - a fascination with a bygone age, the primitive
printing techniques, the naivety of the design, or the use of
colour? All of the above, of course, but it's not quite that
simple. "Occasionally people offer me something they've found that
they think I might like", says Andy. "But usually they're wrong -
it doesn't excite me at all. The magic is missing." To a graphic
designer, most the content of this book can safely be regarded as
'bad' design. But there is some magic in each and every piece that
has made Andy either pick it up off the street, trail through
online links, or enter some dodgy looking shop on the other side of
the world just to snap it up. Here you'll find everything from
sweet wrappers to flash cards, from soap powder boxes to speedway
flyers, from wrestling programmes to bus tickets. More tat than you
can shake a stick at. Taken together, it represents a lifetime of
gleeful hunting and gathering. * tat (noun) - anything that looks
cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition; junk, rubbish,
debris, detritus, crap, shite
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