OUGD603 - Extended Practice: Ditto Press

Today we were introduced to Ben Freeman from Ditto Press. He started the day by introducing himself and showing us a presentation to explain a little bit about who he is and his background as a designer.

Below are the notes I wrote down throughout his talk:

• Involved in the music industry
• Carried out a lot of work in the tattoo and piercing industry
• Attended evening school in Graphic Design
• Free thinking - typographic work
• Typographic housing installations
• Installation on Trafalgar Square
• Got commissioned to do the window display at Harrods where they used die cut cars and placed them all individually in place
• Interactive visual merchandising
• Worked a lot with editing work - interested in crafting words to tell a story
• Not a massive font obsessive
• Do care about what and how something is being communicated
• Values the importance of audience
• Went on to do 'Fun' magazine, not for profit magazine 'to be able to do what we want.'
• This then became a staple magazine
• 5000 were produced and each had 64 pages
• Worked with American Apparel
• Worked in journalism
• Vice magazine experience - Andy Capper the editor was really honest and taught him a lot (photography)
• Used to go and make trips - went to Belfast 
• Grabisce - Went to Slovenia with other students and spent a year working on it, carried out interviews, 2-3000 photographs on film, DNA analysis - big political issue 55-60 years ago - became a book and some articles - self published book and he managed the distribution
• This is when DITTO PRESS started
• Realised he needed backing, being your own boss
• 8-9 people
• Revolves around publishing
• He now has little time to design as he is too busy running the business
• Runs around checking on everyone all of the time
• Risograph printing
• 80% books, letters, handouts etc
• Skinhead - an archive
• Toby Mock since 1966 been collecting all of this stuff (this links to our project)
• Toby Mock - book about craftwork
• Working on projects to do with social workers, and schizophrenia
• Loves sensitive topics
• Time consuming projects
• Always just lets things go to see where they lead
• Philosophical

We then worked with him and started to think about our own methodologies. I found it hard to understand what exactly what was expected of us today, but I am sure it will become clearer with time.