Chapter 1 of 24
Kenneth Grange, 1985
The starting point of my life as a designer goes back to art school. At that time “ art schools had very simple differentiation of courses, 'fine art' or 'commercial art'. And coming from a very ordinary work—ethic type of family, commercial art was the only choice that seemed sensible to make. That in turn only meant what we call 'graphic design'. But I spent a lot of time in the drawing classes. My head- master who was a nice old man introduced me to a friend who was a town planner. I got through her into an architectural practice called ARCON working on presentafl tions for them, booklets and leaflets and so on. From ARCON I went into the army. I was attached to the armoured corps as a techni— cal illustrator drawing pieces of mechanism for instructors manuals. And I think it was actually the beginning of my, in a sense, sort of understanding, of an interest in the mixture of presentation, and construction - because I had to take things apart in order to draw them, and drawing them you knew more about them and so on. I came out and started then working. I got jobs with three different architectural practices dealing with interior detailing. The last man I worked for was a marvellous man named Jack Howe. I was introduced to cabinets and architectural ironmongery, clocks, the sort of paraphernalia which were actually mass-production, therefore they were industrkfl.dbshyiprojects, but typically those which had an immediate use inside buildings. Jack Howe had encouraged me to take on any work that came my way. I designed a small exhibition for the Atomic Energy Authority. And then they called me one day to say they'd got another job they'd like me to do and it was a huge job. It was an exhibit'they were going to mount in a forthcoming international conference of application of nuclear energy in Geneva. It was a 3000 sq. m. exhibition stand, huge by my terms. I within a fortnight I was employing three people because the job had turned into five different languages, which meant a huge amount of extra work and so on. I made a lot of money from it. And that allowed me to then look for any work that could come my way which was to do with design of objects. I had two clients almost within a week of one another, Kodak and Kenwood, both of whom gave me a lot of work. I worked for Kodak for about 23 years I think. I'm still working for Kenwood. I've got together a few slides of the work that I!ve done over these years.