Description

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