When I first enrolled in art school many years ago I was keen to learn all about traditional drawing, but I also quickly developed a love for graphic design, typesetting and layout. Although I’ve maintained my work as an artist and illustrator, working with images and typography became the core of my career at the Mercury newspaper and as a freelance designer. I’ve designed and produced news pages, magazine layouts and books, taking initial ideas and concepts from basic sketches and roughs all the way to finished art and press production. There was an old saying that hardened journalists had ink in their veins, and it was the same for the artists and designers that took their work and crafted it into visually engaging newspaper and magazine pages. The internet has brought a whole new dimension to design, but many of the tried and true principles of print design apply just as strongly to the web.