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Reputations
'I'm a creative director. I work with photographers. Years ago I said design is a piece of piss. Design is something that shouldn't be complicated.'
Terry Jones (b. 1945) studied graphics at the West of England College of Art at Bristol but left – as a matter of principle – before qualifying when a favourite tutor [Richard Hollis] was 'dismissed'. He married Tricia (who makes occasional interventions in this interview), in 1968 and they have two children, Kayt and Matthew, both professional photographers. His first job was as Ivan Dodd’s assistant and in 1972, following stints at Good Housekeeping and Vanity Fair, he became Art Director at English Vogue for five years.
In 1980 Jones launched i-D, whose subject matter and graphic style have had a huge influence on magazine and advertising design. Starting as a home-produced, stapled-together fanzine with a rough-and-ready approach to 'instant design', i-D has evolved into a fat glossy, acting on the way as a training ground for young journalists, designers and photographers. His work has been documented in Instant Design: A Manual of Graphic Techniques (Phaidon, 1990) and Catching the Moment (Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1997). In 1984 Jones enlisted the help of Time Out publisher Tony Elliott to turn i-D into a more commercial newsstand product. In 1996, after several years spent concentrating on advertising art direction, Jones decided to take a more hands-on approach to i-D, and has subsequently steered the design-led monthly back towards fashion, while retaining a puckish, punkish originality in style and content, throwing material together quickly in the manner of a low-budget film. Jones has just applied some of the
i-D ethos to the Florence Biennale 1998 (theme: Fashion/Cinema), presenting '2001 (minus 3)', a collaboration between 22 designers and 22 photographers
in a cavernous old disused railway station. Jones insists that 'fashion is a game', and a playful, competitive spirit informs his work, his life and his conversation.
John L. Walters: I asked my thirteen-year-old daughter to come up with a question for you and she said: 'Were you a fashion victim at school?'
Terry Jones: I never thought of myself as a fashion victim. At school I didn’t want to wear the uniform like everyone else – I always wanted my jacket longer, so I used to inflate my chest when I was being measured, which meant my jacket would be about three sizes larger – more like a drape jacket. I used to turn my tie upside down so it was like a slim tie with a long jacket. But I never considered myself a victim of fashion until they tried to throw me out of college for not looking like a design student – they said I looked like an art student. I was trained as a commercial artist, so when I was hand painting and lettering I’d wipe my brush on my jeans, which never got into the washing machine. They were skin-tight, so they got older and better . . . together with not cutting my hair, wearing a jacket which had mould on it and um . . .
Tricia Jones And odd socks.
There was a fur coat that I used to wear inside out with the lining ripped out so you could see the numbers of the pelts.
JLW: Was this a time when art students were allowed to be smelly, but commercial artists were supposed to be respectable?
TJ: Yes. We had an external lecturer called Ron Ford who had his own design studio, who came in wearing a button-down blue shirt with a knitted tie. His first talk was about how you would have to talk to people who were in business – who would have a problem talking to you if you were too extreme. When he came back the following week I made an effort by wearing a clean shirt. We’d both compromised, because he was wearing an open-neck shirt and no tie – the minute he walked in we both laughed. I trace i-d back to that moment.
JLW: The concept of what ordinary people wear?
TJ: How people are summed up by the way they look. I wanted to do a magazine that got under the skin of fashion. Fashion for me was always a game, so it was necessary to get underneath that façade.
JLW: Did it occur to you that you should be on the art course rather than commercial art?
TJ:I didn’t really know the distinction between design and art. I think I was in line for a career in the RAF as a draughtsman.
JLW: Is this because you were good at drawing?
TJ: I was actually not very good at technical drawing, but I showed some interest in art. But the teaching of art in school is very destructive: when I had to go
to Bristol for an interview I was asked to bring ten pieces of work. All of my work had been destroyed, so I had to do ten pieces of work the night before the interview. (I actually got eight done.)
JLW: Could you have gone into something completely different and made a go of that?
TJ: If chance hadn’t played a part . . . you know I’m very much a believer in going moment by moment. But chance is something which you create. I think you make things happen . . .
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