Meet John Thackray, Senior Designer at Catchy. John will discuss his journey into the world of developer marketing, and the early influences that led him to a career in design.
Senior Designer
In today’s Meet the Team, we hear from John Thackray, Senior Designer at Catchy. John discusses how he transformed his design passion into a profession and how the collaborative environment at Catchy influences his work.
A graduate of Bath Spa University, John lives in Bristol, UK. As part of the Catchy design team, John communicates visual ideas and information and helps our clients’ brand identities come to life.
The scope of the work I do at Catchy is broad, which is something I enjoy about being a designer. At any one time, I can jump between a range of projects, like creating UI assets for a client's developer portal, designing visuals for an event space, storyboarding a motion video, or typesetting a whitepaper.
Music in all formats has always been a large part of my life and I’ve always wanted to be a designer or artist of some description. I was (and to a degree still am) obsessed with album artwork and growing-up really wanted to work in the design department at the NME or one of the plethora of guitar magazines in the UK. For a reason only my 18 year old self knows, I opted to study product design at university rather than graphics. After two years, I left university and pursued a career in hospitality, before moving into optometry to work as a dispensing optician.
During all of this time, I was still sketching, painting, and attending evening courses in printmaking and life drawing. Eventually, I decided it was time to return to university and study to become a designer, graduating twelve years ago on my thirtieth birthday.
While working as a senior designer at BandLab Technologies, I traveled to Portland, OR to conduct interviews with a few members of The Dandy Warhols. Before one of the interviews, I ran into a design lecturer and friend of the band. During our conversation we realized a lot of our design principles aligned and he asked if I’d be willing to do some guest lecturing at Portland State. A couple of months later I returned to take him up on the offer. When the pandemic hit, I enrolled in a higher education teaching course at Harvard, and upon completion, got work teaching publishing design at Bath Spa University.
During this time, two other things happened with differing levels of success. The first was BandLab Technologies added the NME to their publishing stable, which enabled me to flex my new-found journalism muscle to bend the ear of some of my favorite musicians. The other was the Dandy Warhols asking if I could help promote a record they were releasing. This served as a reminder to ask at least one question before saying yes to work.
I was always going to say yes, and am really glad I did, but the record was an ambient, four-hour body of music arranged as a backdrop for dinner parties. It was released at a time when nobody was allowed to socialize.
I’m a big fan of old ephemera. I find items that were designed for purpose without any intention of longevity beautiful. Some great examples are the letterpressed running orders from Walthamstow Greyhound Track that I was given by one of my old lecturers.
I have a ration book from 1953 that I regularly reference when looking for ways to clearly get information across using typography. It’s amazing how much information is clearly presented and beautifully typeset in such a small document (110mm x 125mm). Strong typesetting is a skill I feel is progressively getting overlooked the further we move into a digital-first society.
I also find design with an element of tactility or movement incorporated into it incredibly inspiring. If it has a typographic element, even better. I recommend people look at the work of Alan Kitching, Alan Fletcher, or David Pearson to see what I mean.
Collaboration. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some incredible people in my varied career, and the most successful places I've worked have all encouraged collaboration. It kind of goes without saying, but it’s the best way to develop individually and as a team. When everyone within a group trusts each other, you can produce some truly great work.
Do it! The internet, particularly YouTube, is full of tutorials that can help guide you through using the relevant software, but I’d still recommend going to university if you can. Do your research and make sure you find a course that encourages design thinking in addition to the production of the final piece, and one that offers a wide range of creative facilities to all students.
The course will probably be called Graphic Communication rather than Graphic Design (in the UK at least).
I also recommend that you read these three books:
Be a nice human and leave your ego at the door. The design industry is smaller than you might think, and you never know when you might run into people who you’ve potentially rubbed up the wrong way in the past.
Want to work with John and the rest of the Catchy team? Well, you’re in luck - we’re hiring! Check out our Careers page for our current openings.
