I couldn't find a short written piece about th ebackgrudn of SImon Esterson, but this passage I found quite interesting, and I could pick bits out which talk about his background and rewrite it.
Text from Here
You wouldn’t think a well-known heavy weight in the magazine design industry would introduce a talk about their career with “I’m not really a graphic designer” and you’d probably think this was a slip of the tongue right?
With the beginning of Simon Esterson’s love for design centering in the heart of studying A level art, and an interest in journalism from writing for his school magazine, its easy to understand why he would begin his talk to the typographic circle with this very sincere quote above.Setting the scene nicely with his career only moving with a passion for process, holding the “natural position” in the production side of his school magazine (where his love of journalism fell into a different channel), and no study into the subject at all, Simon Esterson explains how he began young life in the career of graphic design working at an instant print shop, creating letter headings and wedding invitations and practicing the art of print. This part of the story pinpointed around a year of waiting to apply for his now well known position at business to business magazine Architects Journal.
Starting at Architects Journal in 1978 saw his work and love affair soar for creating clear and concise letter headings, logo’s and navigational equipment to the readers of this weekly magazine and become art editor in 1983. Whilst at Architects Journal Esterson continued to further his practice with experimental projects, one being the Edinburgh Times in 1981 for the Edinburgh Fringe festival wittily explaining here that “when all else fails and really big piece of type is a nice idea”.
More experimentation continued following collaboration with Deyan Sudjic and Peter Murray to create a slightly different architectural magazine called Blueprint. Blueprint was made to still have a business aesthetic but with the added creativity of bold images and more homely feel, and something a lot more experimental. Later on down the line due to the public also appreciating its potential and creating a major increase in popularity saw Simon leave Architect’s Journal and continue climbing further up the design ladder.
The drive to conquer every designers dream was still on the mind and first of many successes was the collaboration of Simon and Mike Lackersteen which went on to become studio Esterson Lackersteen that saw the start of work with sight and sound. Simon also travelled with The Guardian, Harper’s wine magazine, Reportage and many over sea’s Magazine’s such as Domus, NZZ, Z, Stil and Publico.
All these magazines saw the use and continued evolution of Simon’s bold use of coloured shape and large typography alongside beautiful photography with the final touch of simple yet effective composition. This bigger and brighter style stamp is pushed even further in experimentation and the continued climb of Esterson when looking at the current issue of eye magazine, which is where we find ourselves studying his work to the present day.
It’s inspiring to see shown by Simon Esterson that with continued effort, study, practice and passion you can achieve anything, and by the looks of the limited edition poster given out at the end of the talk with credit to Alexander Ecob, Esterson will be reaching even dizzier heights to his career in the near future.
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