Phill Grimshaw, Northern Hero, Lettering Artist & Inspiration.

When I discovered (with no help from my careers teacher at school), I could actually make a living doing something I loved to do – draw, the motivation to study for my GCEs fell through the floor and so in September 1970, with 3 O Level passes I started a new life.

I was 16 years old, I was an art student. After the strict discipline of a Catholic education, first at a a primary school where I was publicly chastised if I missed Mass on a Sunday, followed by five years at an all boys Grammar School taught by bullying priests and picked on by bullying boys – I was somewhere I felt I belonged. My education had left gaping holes in my social skills – I had much to learn. At Bolton Art College I heard a girl swear for the first time, I saw my first real naked woman (in the Life Class) and it was where I first met Phill Grimshaw.

Phill introduced me to Herb Lubalin – his flowing expansive calligraphy, Avant Garde style hand drawn type where the characters were tightly kerned, overlapped and ran into each other. I loved the draughtsmanship and the wit Phil introduced into his own work, which was at that time heavily influenced by Herb Lubalin and Tony Forster, an internationally renowned lettering artist and tutor at Bolton Art College. Phill showed me how to create large scale calligraphy using two taped together pencils. He would the trace and refine the lettering, inking it in, copying it on to line film and printing out large prints which he then retouched and finessed with Opaque White, before again copying on to film before printing out the final artwork. This technique he assured me was how Herb produced his own wonderful work. We have it so easy today!

In his final year of the vocational graphics course, Phill became something of a ‘local hero’when he was accepted to do a Masters degree at the Royal College of Art. This was such a big deal, a half page in the Bolton Evening News was dedicated to his achievement. Inspired by Phill, the RCA became my goal, which I later achieved after I’d spent three years at Maidstone Art College where putting aside my lettering ambitions, I graduated with a degree in Illustration. 

The RCA degree show was a big event for many wannabe future stars. With the smugness of being a future RCA student, I sauntered around the show and stopped at a screen-printed mirror with an elaborately designed piece of calligraphy that simply said “Fuck”. You’re probably thinking “Oh yeah, sounds familiar” but 40 years ago it was a controversial idea that has been copied many times since. Phill and I kept in touch and in my first week at the RCA when after tea in the refectory, I was reluctant to return to the room I shared with 14 others in a house on Queensgate, Phil and I would put the world to rights over a few beers. My accommodation was so bad I went back to Maidstone where I stayed with friends and commuted to London until I found somewhere more suitable.

In the meantime Phill had disappeared from the scene and a lover of all things Northern had packed up and set up a studio in Bolton. He went on to be an influential type designer for Letraset. We met up occasionally and life moved on and eventually we lost touch. 

In the early 80s, when I set up my own studio, virtually every piece of food packaging I designed used hand lettering. And today with the belief instilled in me at the RCA – to look for the idea in everything, I’ve always sought to have an idea in the simplest piece of lettering or logo.

Without Phill’s influence and his passion for lettering, I'm sure my own career and work would have taken quite a different course. 

Sadly Phill died in 1998 but his work remains a great legacy and his influence on me remains.

For more on Phill Grimshaw click here