Prince and Snoopy have a lot to answer for

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Snoopy. I would spend hours drawing everyone’s favourite dog. At school. At home. With friends.

To this day, if I find myself on a deserted beach, the muscle memory will kick in, and my son and I will start drawing Snoopy in the wet sand with pieces of driftwood. I begin with his ear, and round it goes to that distinctive head and nose. That’s how much I drew him.

As a kid, I wished I was Charles M. Schulz. He had this entire world in his head—a world of charm, vulnerability and humour.

Most eight-year-olds didn’t have playdates with other kids that drew, but I did. I was that weird kid, always drawing, and I hung out with other odd kids, drawing.?

When I was 13, the obsession hopped from Snoopy to Prince.

His music. His fashion. His androgynous sexuality. The ability to reinvent himself and change every album’s look and sound mesmerised me. It still does, if I am honest. No one has come close ever since.

Every album was like a new brand.

Purple Rain. The Linn drum machine. A fusion of funk and rock. Flowers. Purple. That eye.?

Parade. Black and white. European. An impossible mix of sparse funk, jazz and acoustic that no one else could pull off.?

Sign O’ The Times. Peach and black. That symbol. On the first hearing, Housequake blew my mind.

Prince invited us into his world, curated and created it all.

The doodling continued.?

Instead of Snoopy, Prince albums and lettering adorned my bedroom walls and the covers of my school books.

The Purple Rain eye or the Sign O’ The Times symbol were everywhere. Those that know what I am referring to will understand.

Doodling. Drawing. I didn’t know it then, but I was always obsessed with those that created, always seeking perfection and imagining worlds, creating something from nothing.?

Mr Parsloe, my geography teacher, told my mother at a parent’s evening, “Marcus is terrible at geography, but he will make more with his pencil than I will teaching.”

My art teachers weren’t so convinced, though. “Throw some paint around. Be more expressive.”

I resisted. It went against the grain. Order out of chaos is what I do. Perfect. Not messy or flawed, thank you.

I failed to get on an art foundation course, but one desperate phone call from my mother later, and I was in front of Tutsy Pearce, head of Art and Design at an art college in Gloucester.

“Marcus, darling, you’re a designer. You must go and see Alison Meadows.”

And off I went to see Alison Meadows with my portfolio of drawings of Prince, letter forms and a natural desire for clean lines, white space and perfection.

My tutors saw it. They knew. I didn’t. I was a designer. My calling found me. Not the other way around.

“I need you to fill this form in, Marcus, but Tutsy is right. You’re a designer.”

And so the drawing continued. Mike Brinkworth, an old-school typographer, had us drawing letter forms even though we had an entire suite of Apple Macintosh computers at our disposal when Apple was in their beige phase.

“You’ve got to get to know the anatomy of a typeface, so draw it!” he said with the thump of his desk to punctuate his sentence. And so I got to know Times New Roman, that most pedestrian of typefaces, inside out, meticulous pencil stroke by pencil stroke.

Jan Tschichold, the godfather of typographic modernism, was my next obsession. I doodled out tiny rectangles in A4 proportions using tramlines as type to learn all about white space, layout and beauty.?

And so, without telling you my entire life story, it all started with drawing and still does.

Your brand starts with a doodle.

Making sense of your business begins with a series of scribbles and lines to connect the dots.

Countless identities, UX problems, and business opportunities start in my head and, by extension, end up on paper — complexity tamed into simplicity. Order out of chaos.

My vision of your vision unfolds.?It comes to life on the screen but is born on paper.?

My tools?

Obsession about your story and business, and making them look like the business. Muji notebooks for listening. A4 paper for thinking. One Staedler clutch pencil, one MacBook Pro, Prince and Snoopy.

That’s my founder’s story. What’s yours?