Ryan is a a graphic designer with over a decade of industry experience, producing work for clients of all shapes and sizes in Scotland and beyond. He founded his design practice — Rydo — in Glasgow in 2009 and has steadily built up a varied portfolio of work for a similarly eclectic client base.

Ryan believes passionately in the power of design to influence, inform and delight. His work is produced with an emphasis on clear and engaging communication, informed by a rigorous conceptual, intellectual and typographic focused approach. He is a long term member of the International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD) and an organiser of the LongLunch (www.longlunch.com) design lecture series.

Job Nº1: Fast Eddy’s Delivery Boy

My first foray into the world of gainful employment came at the tender age of ten. Yes, you read that right… ten years old. I was living the expat childhood in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, attending a large, American-dominated international school and living on a private compound with my family, that was owned by the airline my dad was working for at the time. The compound, Saudia City, was a pretty comfortable place with many amenities: swimming pools, tennis & basketball courts, indoor rec centres (for alternative air-conditioned sporting activity like ping pong or pool) and a ‘commercial centre’ which included a supermarket, dry cleaners, chemist, donut shop, chinese restaurant and… FAST EDDY’S.

This was the place to frequent for any self-respecting Saudia City youngster. A glorious Bangladeshi-run stainless steel laden establishment serving up burgers, chicken nuggets, pizzas and a variety of other western and sub-continental delights. Job number 1 for me: Eddy’s delivery boy. Fairly self explanatory but I’ll elaborate on what the duties entailed: taking bags of hot food to a customer’s dwelling place by bicycle, for which I would be paid the princely sum of 1 Riyal (if memory serves correctly) and a tip if I was lucky. That works out at around 17p per delivery, excluding tips. The duration of my employment was very brief, I’m sorry to say. I started the job during school holidays and quickly realised that cycling around the compound in 35ºC+ heat for a pittance wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. On my fourth or fifth day on the job, the heavens opened — a rare occurrence — and I took the decision to remain indoors. I took the same decision the following day as well. In fact, I never delivered another pepper steak for Fast Eddy again.

Job Nº2: Sunday Shop Assistant & Boss of Paper Boys

Fast forward to age 14 and the considerably less sunny, more precipitous climes of Inverclyde. My aunt Joan runs a family-owned newsagents in the west end of Greenock, Hall’s, which has been in business for eons. It was always a happy place for me and my siblings when we were young pups as a visit there usually meant being supplied with a 10p mix. A joyous experience, each and every time! Imagine my delight when I was presented with the offer to step behind the counter and be the guy (/boy) who makes the 10p or 20p mixtures… and I would be paid for my trouble; £15 cash money per 9am-ish to 2.30pm Sunday shift.

So, that was my gig almost every Sunday — and sometimes a Saturday too — from the beginning of my Standard Grades through to my time as a big, gangly awkward 6th year at Greenock Academy. I learned how to drag myself out of bed on a weekend day, work a till, boss paper boys around, fill a drinks fridge, chat to old ladies about the weather and speed-read the Sunday Sport. All essential life skills, I’m sure you’d agree.

Job Nº3: Burger Flipper under The Golden Arches

Next job on the list sees a return to the world of fast food and employment with one of the most recognisable names on the planet, McDonald’s. After a few happy years in the newsagents, with only a few months of school left, I decided I needed a new challenge, in terms of my ‘career’. I had a couple of friends who had been working for one of the THREE McDonald’s in Greenock town centre and waxed lyrical about the camaraderie and ‘generous’ hourly pay on offer at the Golden Arches.

I duly applied, went through a proper job interview and was promptly supplied with blue trousers, a checked shirt, clip-on tie, apron, cap and my very own name badge. (I was disappointed not be given a red curly wig, stripy tights and size 27 yellow shoes but I think years of intense training was required before team members could make the step up to Clown.) Anyway, I spent the next six months in the Oak Mall McDonald’s kitchen, making Big Macs®, quarter pounders, sterilising shaky machines and disinfecting the ball pool. More invaluable strings added to my bow. Then, one Saturday while I was enjoying a shift on the tills away from the kitchen heat, some management bigwigs turned up, told us we were closing early, made us pull the place apart, clean everything from top to bottom and then informed us that the they ‘had to close the store’. Forever.

Job Nº4: Barman & Server of Dundee’s Finest All Day Breakfast

After the dramatic closure of my beloved McDonald’s, there is bit of a gap on my CV. To be fair, I moved from west coast to east — Greenock to Dundee — within that period and took a few months to come to terms with starting life as a first year art student in a strange new town. I had toyed with the notion of enquiring about part-time employment in McDonald’s in the city centre but my passion for Big Macs had all but disappeared by that point. After some careful consideration, I decided that pouring pints of lager was probably more my thing, now that I was a fully-fledged student and adult (technically speaking).

I went about asking every bar that I walked past if they needed staff and filled in loads of application forms. I got a call from O’Neill’s, the Irish chain pub, and invited to attend an interview which proved to be more of an audition. Three hours on a Monday night telling jokes, role playing, designing posters for imaginary events and downing bottles of a disgusting alcopop known as Reef. There were 25 people in attendance and there were four jobs on offer. ‘What a waste of time’, I thought to myself after, but… I got the call the next day informing me that I’d made the grade! The next four years were spent pouring perfect pints of Guinness, clearing up broken glass off the floor on St Patrick’s night and chatting to old dudes about football. (I also managed to read design books on the quiet Sunday shifts, which no doubt ensured that I passed my dissertation in fourth year.)

Job Nº5: Sender of Facsimiles at the Royal Bank of Scotland Mortgage Centre

Last on my First Five Jobs list, and most definitely the least, was my stint working for the good old Royal Bank over two summers while I was still a student. I had an ‘in’ through my cousin, who had been working at the Mortgage Centre in Greenock for a few years and was delighted to get a taste of my first ‘proper’ job, wearing a shirt and tie and working in an office. No fries, no burgers, no all day breakfasts, no pints of Guinness, no broken glass; I was moving up in the world!

My enthusiasm proved to be short lived. On day one, I was asked if I minded sending some faxes to lawyers and estate agents around the UK to confirm mortgage offers. I was given a pile and quickly shown the fundamentals of the office fax machine. I dispatched the initial pages in good time and felt pretty pleased with myself. ‘Oh good,’ remarked one of my erstwhile superiors, ‘here’s some more for you to do after lunch time.’ The next day, I was presented with another great heaving pile of faxes to send, which again took up the duration of my shift. This was repeated ad infinitum for three months… and it was exactly the same the next year I did that job.

It was absolutely mind numbing. However, it filled me with a sense of determination to work really hard when I went back to art school in Dundee and try to make a success of being a graphic designer. I didn’t want to spend hours on end sending faxes in a carpet-tiled, strip lit office and I didn’t want to wear a shirt and tie everyday.

So, I don’t.

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I am the Senior Designer at Animade where I work on projects big and small, as well as looking after our brand identity, and I help out on some front-end development as well. I studied Graphic Design at Camberwell College of Arts, and am a self-taught web-developer. I also curate content for our digital design inspiration blog Hover States.

1. Burger King — 2 days in 2004
When I was a teen I worked in Burger King for 2 days. It wasn’t for me.

2. Office – Part-time 2008-2010
Living off a student maintenance loan in London doesn’t get you that far, so part-time work was essential, so I worked as a sales assistant selling shoes. It wasn’t for me.

3. INT Works (It’s Nice That) Intern — Late 2011
I joined INT Works as an intern for 3 months in 2011, just after graduating from Camberwell College of Arts that summer. It was meant to be only a few weeks at first, but they wanted to keep me on for an extended period, which turned into a short freelancing stint. This was the first job which started my “career” as it is now.

4. Freelance — Early 2012
After It’s Nice That I freelanced for a few months, and worked on projects with my fellow It’s Nice That intern James Cartwright under the moniker ‘Official Business’.

5. Animade — 2012-Present
In June 2012 I joined Animade, known then as Chambers Judd. I saw their job posting which read “If you like design and the internet, then come work for us”, which bluntly described me. I also wanted to work somewhere which was small and growing, so Animade was perfect. Since then it has grown from 4 of us to 15 which has been a great experience for me being one of their first employees and watching it grow. My most recent project here has been leading our rebrand, which we handled all in-house. This included refreshing the visual identity and designing the new website, and other internal tools and stationery.

Connect with Mike on Twitter here.

Photo credit: Alex Harley

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Prior to joining CCA, Viviana produced a range of international projects including curating the Young Artist of the Year Award 2014 (YAYA) at the A.M. Qattan Foundation in Ramallah which supports young Palestinian artists and artists of Palestinian descent; being part of a curatorial team for the 4th Athens Biennale which won the 2015 European Cultural Foundation Princess Margriet Award for Culture; and working as co-director of vessel in Puglia, Italy, which is a platform for critical discussion related to cultural, social, economic and political change through communities. She has also curated with Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Nottingham Contemporary and Nitra Gallery, Slovakia.

Here, Viviana talks us through her first five jobs.

Intern at the Museum of Capodimonte in Naples, Italy, 2005.
I covered various roles but mainly took care of a touring exhibition of tapestries. I digitised the documents of the tapestries related to Cervantes’ major work Don Quixote, considered to be the first modern European novel. Then we organised for 23 tapestries to be exhibited in Rome at the Quirinal Palace, one of the current official residences of the President of the Italian Republic.

Haircut model in Milan, Italy, 2006 – 2008.
I was working as a model for Mind agency taking part in hairstylist training, workshops and shows. My haircut would change every three weeks. Sometimes they would try new products or very extravagant colours on me. It was very good fun!

Translator/Associate Assistant for Baldini e Castaldi Dalai Ed in Milan, Italy, 2006 – 2008.
I was responsible for translation of the Oxford Companion for Art as well as the coordination of a team of translators. I also collaborated with B&C Dalai for their new art website.

Teacher for an elementary school in Naples, Italy, 2008.
I gave classes to parents in deprived communities which focussed on the use of art as a tool to connect with their kids. We explored the origin of art media and art formats. We analysed landscapes and portrait production in modern art and we made our own portraits. It was really inspiring!

Researcher for the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bratislava-Slovakia, 2008 –2009.
I researched the development of the contemporary art system in Slovakia. The research project was hosted by the University Komenského and the Slovak National Gallery (SNG) of Bratislava. I was working under the guidance of Alexandra Kusa who was the curator for the contemporary art section at that time and is now the director of the gallery. She has been a great inspiration to me! This experience acted as a springboard for my curatorial career.

The current series of events Cooking Pot is now ongoing at the CCA, Glasgow. Find more information here.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Jobs discussed in this article:

1. Canoe Instructor/Camp Counsellor
2. Flower Shop Attendant
3. Ice Cream Scooper
4. Baker
5. WORN Fashion Journal

Inheriting a long standing organisation and expecting to good by it is a daunting position to be in. But I somewhat unexpectedly found myself in that exact spot when I started working at Document. To say my position at the festival has snowballed over the past two and a half years would be something of an understatement. Coordinating means putting out a lot of fires, multi-tasking and collaborating to your hearts content. When people ask me what it’s like I’m often inclined to tell them: “I herd cats for a living.”

Looking back on my twelve odd years in the workforce is a strange activity. My past jobs feel like past lives – and the path to Document is much more like a process of elimination than a coherent career path. Growing up, friends lay the groundwork of fruitful careers while I pinged from childcare to the service industry to a smattering of arts jobs.

Before university I was a film obsessed, theatre nerd who pined for a job in journalism. Rather than volunteering or trying to gain work experience I nurtured a short attention span for part time jobs. Spending a number of summers working at camps as a glorified babysitter and canoe instructor. At 17 I worked in a flower-shop where I wasn’t allowed to touch the flowers – instead I was sequestered in the basement where I washed pots and vases and was kept company by Seabiscuit … the store cat. Then there was the ice-cream scooping where I and a staff of teenagers made thousands of waffle cones and slung ice-cream in a badly ventilated but very popular shop in Toronto’s east end.

While friends made smooth transitions from unpaid internships to salaried jobs in advertising, journalism, and politics – I was left floundering. There was this abstract career in my mind. It involved the arts and outreach but I had no idea how to make it happen. Instead I spent hours at the cinema, trolling bookstores and trying to undo the circumscribed ways of thinking that four years of liberal arts can do to a person. Throughout that process I went to a lot of events that challenged my notion of creativity and success. Most memorably Trampoline Hall which was a “bar room lecture series” in Toronto’s west end. Founded by Misha Globerman and Sheila Heti, I became enamoured by their grassroots and idiosyncratic approach to programming. It was a salon of sorts and every time I left there was a little voice in my head saying … “that is what I want to do, but how?!”

I came out of of undergrad with an Honours in English, exasperated by abstract thought, and craving practical work. Seeing a final product come out of hours of toil that wasn’t just an essay but rather something tactile was incredibly attractive. So in my post-graduation ennui I wound up baking. I’ve got the scars to prove it. The hours spent in hot kitchens and early mornings served their therapeutic purpose but it was hardly what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Although it was tempting seeing as I was good at it – and it was delicious.

In 2011 I got the opportunity to intern at WORN Fashion Journal. Whilst there I worked on the publishing team and I got to see first hand how you develop a marketable brand within a strict budget. It was a brilliant publication and one I greatly admired. It was feminist, intersectional and intellectual but always accessible – WORN, however, did not make money but they had conviction. My time at the publication was spent entirely in a learning capacity – it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say I was expendable. One time my editor turned to me and said: “Cayley you know so much about everything we just need to figure out how to apply it?” I took it as a compliment at the time.

By 2012 it was pretty obvious Toronto wasn’t working for me. I was so aware of what other people were doing and how they were doing it better I couldn’t focus. So I put an ocean between myself and my home town. Which may have been one of the best things I have ever done. It gave me the perspective and ability to apply all of the curiosity and passion I had for film and outreach without second guessing and comparing myself to my peers. It’s also a testament to cities like Glasgow. Where your ambition isn’t drowned out by the cacophony of competition you get in bigger towns.

Despite what I consider very separate stages in my eclectic CV, have somehow coalesced to be the perfect background to running an independent film festival. The years of running around hot kitchens, getting through a never-ending todo list, and hours of customer service drudgery have made me surprisingly adept for coordination.

There is a hell of lot more I need to learn but my time with Document has been the best education I could have gotten in confirming what it is I want to do. Which is work with communities, remain fiercely independent, and inspire conversation and change through the arts.

Document 2015 is running from October 16, 17, and 18 at Glasgow’s CCA.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Award-winning broadcaster and director David Street (pictured above) made programmes for all the main UK’s TV channels before he turned to feature documentaries. Here he describes his career progression.

Getting the work habit

I was brought up in a small village in the peak District of Derbyshire. My family had a building firm so I spent most of school holidays working for the firm.

I had a variety of other weekend and holiday jobs during my teens, like paper rounds, Christmas postie, working in a textile factory, serving in a post office, but always it came back to working for the builders. By the time I left college as a qualified Art and Drama teacher at 21, I was running building sites, responsible for 50 or more men, often two or three times my age building a 100 plus homes at any one location. I was working 12 hour days often 7 days a week. After 18 months, a disagreement with one of my uncles, who was running the business, ended in me walking out.

Striking it Lucky

It was a two and a half mile walk to the next village where I lived, time to pull my thoughts together. I bought a Manchester Evening News and in the classified jobs section someone had written an advert just for me – or at least that’s what I felt.  They wanted some one between the ages of 21 and 25 – I was just 23, with an interest in Drama and Art – my qualification, who enjoyed watching TV – one of the reasons I’d been made to go to work as a youngster was because I was getting “square eyes” from watching too much TV. It couldn’t have been better.

I applied and after 2 interviews I was offered a job as a trainee assistant film librarian at Granada TV in Manchester – working 40 hours a week for 3 times the wages I’d received in the family firm. When I was told later that over 350 people had applied for the job I couldn’t believe my luck. I was given a great piece of advice on my first day, I was wide eyed and star struck being amongst the cast of Coronation Street, my boss Keith Thompson, just leaned over and whispered in my ear “they go to the toilet, just like you and me” bingo.

“Square eyes” was now getting paid to do what he loved doing, watching TV, or to be more precise, watching and logging TV films and clips – it was a fabulous time to be at Granada. The Bernsteins still owned the company but let Denis Foreman and David Plowright run it. I was watching material shot by the Mikes’ Apted and Newell, Johnathan Powell, Roland Joffe and the brilliant Leslie Woodhead, I was learning by osmosis, listening, watching soaking it all up. After a couple of years I made the move into the cutting rooms, as an assistant film editor working with such brilliant editors as the late Kelvin Hendrie on World in Action, Stan Challis and Tony Ham on drama’s like Country Matter’s or doing inserts for Coronation Street.

It was a different world. We had to be in before the editor, make sure the Acmade or Steenbeck was running smoothly, all chinagraphs sharpened, clean selvits to hand, no dust or single frame trims lying around and get teas and coffees before they were even asked for. Many would now see this as the bad old days, but for me the privilege of being in edits with brilliant programme makers such as Brian Moser, Gus Macdonald, Ray Fitzwalter, Brian Blake, a very young Steve Morrison and the inimitable Leslie Woodhead was a privilege. I was watching how they worked, how they thought, what they liked and what they thought was crap. It was a brilliant education. So brilliant, I feel sad that people coming in to the industry now don’t appear to have the opportunity to do this.

Setting up on my own

While working at Granada I met the fantastic animators Mark Hall and Brian Cosgrove, they were going to set up Cosgrove Hall in an old tobacco warehouse in Chorlton-cum-Hardy – I took a couple of room’s there, bought a couple of Steenbecks and set up David Street Editing Ltd with a contract to cut all Mark and Brian’s work.

Working with brilliantly talented animators and their proteges such as Chris Taylor, Jackie Cockell and Barry Purvis gave me a fabulous insight into the precision and accuracy of animated film making. During this period I started editing TV commercials. I found the discipline of telling a 30 second story fascinating and wanted to do it myself.

Buying the T shirt

This was my move in to Directing and Producing. It was a time when you had to have a showreel – no one would give you the chance to do it if you couldn’t prove you could do it – sort of Catch 22. Saving short ends from various commercial shoots, I eventually built up enough stock to shoot three commercials and with help from camera hire companies and labs I had a showreel. That was me a director – I could wear the T shirt.

Decades later after countless TV commercials and programmes I reverted to the same basic principles to prove I could make a feature documentary. Fortunately now the equipment is so much cheaper, shooting digitally and the computerisation of edit systems means you don’t need labs to process the film you can virtually do it all on your laptop, so that is how BATTLE MOUNTAIN Graeme Obree’s Story started. To get it finished though required a virtual army of brilliant people who all brought their own particular talents and skills to it.

Many more than five jobs later the basic principles I learnt in those early jobs on building sites, in shops and factories are still important. Turn up on time, be enthusiastic, work hard and never stop learning.

Read more about BATTLE MOUNTAIN in David’s My Process article Central Station here.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Edinburgh based freelance graphic designer and photographer Ken Gray tells us how he got to where he is now.

I work on a large variety of pieces, including arts catalogues, magazines and corporate identities. My design work is at kennethgray.co.uk and my photography work is at kennethgray.photography.

1 University Libraries Department, John Smith’s bookshop, Glasgow

For two summers, whilst studying Book Publishing at Napier in Edinburgh, I worked for John Smith’s bookshop in Glasgow. The job was based in a converted church building near the Mitchell Library. Basically I had to open boxes of books and check them off against orders. The part I really remember though was the weeks of adorning books with sticky back plastic protective covers. Much as I wanted to work with books, it wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

2 The Scotsman newspaper, Edinburgh

It seems that most people working in graphic design in Edinburgh went through The Scotsman at some point in their career. This was my first job after leaving college. I had to set adverts for The Scotsman and Evening News using Quark Xpress. I had never used it before, so I bought a visual quickstart guide, went to the pub and read it cover to cover. I was working the 4-11pm shift, which meant that most dinners were takeaway baked potatoes from the shop at the top of Cockburn Street. The advertising department was in the basement of The Scotsman building, and I was working with people of my age and time-served typesetters who really knew their stuff. I had to typeset adverts for the likes of ‘Dial-an-Iron’ and various car companies. The adverts, once we had printed them out, went to paste-up where they were glued on to the page layout. I learned a lot about working quickly and accurately to deadlines.

3 County NatWest, Queen Street, Edinburgh

Next off, I worked for the in-house graphic design department of County NatWest, a division of the NatWest Bank. This would have been about 1991. Already you could see technology changing whilst some practices remained the same. I had to print out the titles of reports for covers, then paste the printout on to a board for the printer. I would adjust kerning between the letters by cutting and moving the text printout on the board. I would make outline drawings in Freehand, then paste them on to the board and overlay the printout with a markup sheet for the printer to let them know what colours should be used. We had a photographic enlarger in its own darkroom. Eventually we had some equipment which seemed like science-fiction at the time – a desktop rotary scanner for transparencies plus Photoshop version 2.5 (before layers!). We would either commission photography or buy it in from agencies like Tony Stone, which at the time had an office in Edinburgh and would send across selections of transparencies for us to choose from. The job was mainly designing covers for the analysts’ reports, making up presentation material or charts, and producing small newsletters. I really learned to pay attention to typeface and layout details.

4 Shaw Marketing and Design, Edinburgh

I joined Shaw Marketing and Design in Edinburgh as a visualiser, which meant that I would take a rough sketch from one of the two designers and work it up into a full design. Whilst there, I worked on a lot of visuals, including making photo-realistic renderings of scotch whisky bottles with proposed labels mocked up on them. I would also work on the packaging artwork for whisky, including Cutty Sark and Glengoyne. I began to learn HTML and CSS, working on websites using the ExpressionEngine CMS. Eventually I became a designer in my own right. I learned how to take a job, right from initial idea and sketch, all the way through visuals, to final finished print-ready artwork.

5 Freelance graphic designer and photographer, Edinburgh

I went freelance in 2006 and was lucky enough to start working for Alliance Trust in Dundee. I worked on material for their newly introduced corporate branding, in co-operation with the in-house department. During that time, I also began to work for other clients, including Scottish Natural Heritage, The Scottish Gallery, Fettes College, the Scottish Wildlife Trust and St Columba’s School. I have worked on a wide variety of commissions, including arts catalogues, brochures, corporate identities, prospectuses, children’s magazines and websites. I know some really good creative people to call upon, so I have a roster of folk to collaborate with, including printers, photographers, paper makers, illustrators and developers. Freelance work comes with its own set of hurdles, but it also allows for opportunities. I’ve been able to develop (boom, boom) more of an interest in photography, and had a couple of photographs included in the RSA Open exhibition in 2014. The most enjoyable part of working as a freelancer is building really good, strong relationships with a client.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Music wasn’t a career I had planned. It was more of a hobby that started to elbow its way into my life more and more until I quit doing proper jobs.

In my late teens I hitch-hiked to France with a guitar and a notion of artistic and romantic revelations. I met a homeless alcoholic outside the Pompidou Centre and for a 50/50 split he would go round with a hat whilst I played and sung. He threw me onto packed Metro carriages with no option but to start playing Simon & Garfunkel songs in front of bored commuters, whilst he danced up and down the carriage collecting centimes.

A few years later I hitch-hiked across America. Again this sounds romantic, but as most Americans will tell you it’s really very stupid and dangerous, which is why nobody does it anymore. When me and my travelling companion got to L.A. we got jobs as rickshaw drivers picking up and driving tourists and drunk students around the Hollywood area. The rickshaws were all pedal-power and there’s a lot of hills in Hollywood.

A brief mention for the romantic summer I spent working in a fish factory in Hull.

I worked in bookshops for years, first in Leicester, then in Glasgow. I liked working in bookshops, but like most booksellers I preferred it when there weren’t many customers. I often made compilations to play in the shop, and then got really sick of the music I had put together as no-one ever got round to changing the tape. A similar thing happens in theatre projects – you hear the same bit of music so many times during rehearsals that you never want to hear it again. In Glasgow I was a children’s book specialist which I enjoyed. It was a really big dynamic department and I’d occasionally be required to dress in an enormous character costume.

For a short time in Glasgow I was a flower delivery driver. I drove a pink van. Some of the stuff was dull corporate locations that wanted expensive displays in big vases, and some of it was more personal and special. Weddings and funerals too. Every once in a while if the person wasn’t at home I’d ask the neighbour to look after the flowers – the look on their faces when I told them they weren’t the intended recipient… Once I delivered them to someone on Kirsty Wark’s street. She saw me and shouted “Are they for me?” and I had to shout “No” back. I never got to appear on Newsnight Review.

After deciding to try and make a go of music, I searched for interesting people to send CDs to. One of them was filmmaker Matt Hulse, who got in touch and we’ve been friends ever since. In a way this was my first job in the creative industries. He used some of my music for a short film he was working on – and then that led to another filmmaker Zam Salim getting in touch, and so on… I’ve worked with them both a lot over the years. My band The One Ensemble made the music for Matt’s extraordinary film Dummy Jim.

Tectonics Glasgow takes place from 1-3 May 2015 at City Halls, Glasgow. Tickets are available from www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso and on 0141 353 8000. For more about Tectonics on Central Station, go here. Daniel Padden’s Glass Hundreds has been specially written for the Old Fruitmarket and is performed as part of the Closing Concert at 9pm on Sunday 3 May.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Nic Hamilton is a visual artist, working in video and animation with a strong connection to music. He collaborates with record labels and electronic music producers, creating evocative pieces of visual and aural synchronicity and combining the categories of video art and music video. His videos capture experiences of natural and constructed environments.

Nic is also Director at SquintOpera Melbourne, an international creative agency specialising in imagining the future of the built environment through film, installation and illustration. Here are his first five jobs:

1. Cherry Picking
I used to pick cherries in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley and would start at 6am and finish at 3pm. It was hot, boring and hard but paid well for a 15 year old.

2. Petrol Station Attendant
Between the ages of 17 and 20 I worked at Launceston’s only 24hr petrol station wearing serving petrol and polishing the bowsers for the nightmarish couple that ran it. My best moment was filling up a red faced man’s diesel 4WD with petrol and subsequently having to get under the car and drain it while being threatened with a bashing.

3. Foundry Assistant
My Dad ran a commercial foundry fabricating large bronze and aluminium artworks. The work was particularly hot and and dirty. Breaking the massive sand moulds apart after a pour to see the result was always exciting. Then came the clean up, grinding and finishing. Having an insight into the huge amounts of labour and technique behind a cast metal artwork was influential and instilled in me the value of craftsmanship and technical rigour. Perhaps the most boring part of the whole process is when it ends up anaesthetised in a gallery.

4. Architect
I worked as graduate architect for a few years after a 5-year degree, but quickly realised I would have absolutely no say in how anything worked or looked until I was either 50 or practising for myself. As a mild control freak with a disdain of being told what to do this profession didn’t sit well with me. On the plus side, I am now fluent in understanding the language that architects deploy.

5. 3D Artist
I taught myself 3D software and worked freelance to make club flyers, grant presentations for artists, various bad logos and design images for architects. I was working blind at this stage and learning from print books before the internet tutorial explosion. I still love learning new technologies and techniques.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Pat Kane is a musician, writer, consultant and researcher. Here he talks about his first five jobs…

1. Summer student jobs: play school attendant and train cleaner | mid-80s
The first made me realise that the expected terminus for a boy of my class and smarts – school teacher – was not going to be arrived at. No patience for weans being sick in synchrony on Wurlitzers. The second – working out of a repairs depot in Motherwell – gave me a big insight into industrial working culture: “slow down, son” being the best remembered phrase. Though after a summer of arguing about politics, it was the coolest thing when a quiet wee fitter gave me a battered copy of Bobby Seale’s Seize The Time, with the injunction to “pass it on.” And I did.

2. Musician under major record contract | 1986-1991
I exchanged labour for money, so I guess it was a job. But in all other respects, far too much fun for a young adult male (working with his brother, in their band Hue And Cry). My version of 80s excess was all realised aesthetics (rather than powdery substances). You’d loved post-punk and its ideological and musical freedoms; now, with a major record business flush with both profits from CDs and still-idealistic A&R men, you got the chance to use the actual New York jazz-and-soul sidemen that you’d only previously made po-mo ironic references to. And conduct muttered album artwork sessions with lugubrious St. Martin’s graduates, or make videos with moonlighting members of Throbbing Gristle (Peter Christopherson). Like I said, too much fun. And still having it: our last Hue And Cry album was Remote: Major to Minor in 2014, and we’ll be bringing out an all-new ballad record in 2015.

3. Freelance journalism and media | 1985-present
While waiting for a record contract in London, I started scrivening for NME as a media/TV reviewer (for my then editor Stuart Cosgrove), and for a pop-culture mag called Jamming. I parlayed my early pop-success into more writing by-lines, and ended up with a column in the Scotsman called “Citizen Kane,” which became a book called Tinsel Show: Pop, Politics, Scotland in 1992. That generated a whole range of gigs for TV and radio, including a live chat show called Nightwatch for Channel Four, and a Sony Award winning series on Radio Scotland. Two reasons I’ve been able to pursue this, through almost all major titles, magazines and broadcasters in the UK. One: my mum compelled me to endure the Scheidegger touch typing course when I was 17. This meant that when my arse got kicked out of the major music biz in 1992, I could sit down to a keyboard and rattle off scripts, texts, articles, and display an employable facility. Two: my film and television studies and literary-theory classes at Glasgow University. The ideas ingested there have enabled me to think out of any tight corner, and leap into surprising places, with both seeming to have pleased enough gatekeepers and budget holders to give me cash for content.

4. Editorial roles within The Herald, founding editor of The Sunday Herald | 1996-2000
I shifted my column back to The Herald from the Scotsman, struck up a friendship with then head of the Scottish Media Group Gus MacDonald (he employed a sociologist as his personal chef), who then gave me two pages every week in the Saturday Herald to do with as I wish. I called them ‘E2’ (for “Second Scottish Enlightenment”) and “Scotgeist” (just to annoy people) – the first a think-tank, the second a New-Yorker style cultural review. Three great outcomes from that. i) When I walked through the editorial floor of The Herald, people whistled the theme tune from “The Twilight Zone.” ii) A senior executive once said, “this isn’t journalism for the 21st century – this is journalism for the 31st century.” iii) Andrew Jaspan saw my trouble-making and asked me to be part of the founding editorial team of The Sunday Herald along with Robert Brown and Richard Walker (now the current editor). So exciting, and so traumatic, was the launch of this title over 1998-2000 for me that I forswore any regular job from that point onwards, and settled down to write The Play Ethic for Macmillan, published in 2004.

5. Speaker/researcher/consultant on play, creativity and innovation | 2000-present
Initially I launched the idea of a “play ethic” – a new mentality for productive, creative lives in the information age – in an essay in Scotland on Sunday in 1996, but amplified it in an essay for The Observer in 2000. From that point onwards, I began to be asked by organisations both commercial and public – whether advertising, tech or toy companies, or broadcasters, educators and public services – to talk to them about the power and potential of play for their organisations or occupations. Over the last ten years, The Play Ethic – now an innovation consultancy – has taken me to Australia, the US, Scandinavia, Eastern Europe. My play axioms even got onto the walls of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2012! My latest engagement around this topic is to be appointed the lead curator at FutureFest a two-day London event organised and funded by Nesta. My next book will try to fuse my understanding of play with our growing sense of environmental limits – it’s to be called Radical Animal.

There’s only one thing I know about “jobs,” and that’s from Confucius: “the man who finds a job he loves never works another day in his life.” That sounds right to me.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.

Kerr Vernon is the Creative Director and founder of KVGD, a Glasgow based design studio that creates engaging, thoughtful, crafted design work. This has been recognised by numerous publications and organisations promoting design excellence. These include D&AD, Scottish Design Awards, Counter Print, Computer Arts and Creative Review.

1. Paper round -  I think this counts? It was 1986. I was obsessed with BMX at the time. It wasn’t too much of a hardship getting up early and bombing round the mean streets of Glasgow on my BMX delivering papers for an hour before school. Obviously the pay was a pittance (enough to buy a record a week and a few cans of Tennents for the Saturday night) but it did sow the seeds of some sort of work ethic. This is despite my best efforts over the following years to do as little as possible, mess about in bands and concentrate on being the next Johnny Marr. (Sadly, a dream I still hold onto. It’s never too late, right?)

2. Finished Artist – A fancy sounding title for a spirit-crushingly dull job. I left school hastily aged 16. To this day I still kind of regret this and I really wish I’d stayed on till 6th year, got good grades and studied at Glasgow School of Art. This could never have happened though as school just wasn’t for me. I was hardly ever there and I had no interest in any subject other than art or P.E. I liked playing football, still do to this day every week.

Nobody in my family went to college or university so it was decided I’d get a job doing the only thing I was any good at. On the strength of my pencil drawings I got a job as a finished artist in a Glasgow advertising agency called Chris Cole and Associates. The pay was a pittance and in hindsight I should have still been at school hanging with my friends. I spent 3 years (from 16-19) processing darkroom prints of cars for press ads for the likes of Arnold Clark. We’d use graph paper and letraset to put them together. It was very, very old school and I was pretty green then. The creative department (3 of us) sat at big desks with slide rules. The creative director smoked a pipe all day and the studio manager smoked at least 20 a day. We each had a can of spray mount on our desks too so the air was pretty toxic. I’d easily spend around four hours a day in a tiny cupboard converted into a darkroom. Pretty miserable stuff and eventually I was made redundant. On the plus side I had some experience behind me which helped open doors.

Kerr Vernon at age 23

3. Various art working jobs - I’m bunching these together as I didn’t really stay at one place for any length of time. From ages 19 – 24 I worked in three or four Glasgow advertising agencies. All gone now of course. They were good times and I met lots of cool people. Some I still see to this day. Incredibly, I was promoted to studio manager at the Bridge/Alliance. I was in charge of six art workers, it was hard work but I never took it seriously and only cared about whatever band I was in at the time. A major pet peeve of mine would be when an art director would stand behind you and ‘Direct Art’. This involved me moving things around the page for them while they stroked their chin and made the layout juuuuust right. In fact, this is pretty much what motivated me to become a designer. I also decided being a manager wasn’t for me and I left on a whim to go to Australia. I spent about two and a half years in Sydney all in. Happy days.

4. Designer – My first proper job where it said ‘Designer’ on a business card was tictoc. (They’re now a digital agency, doing pretty well I believe). By this point I’d crashed a year at Cardonald College gaining an Advanced Diploma in Graphic design. I had a student folio and some designs I’d done in Australia. It was deemed good enough for tictoc and I was delighted. I got off to a good start winning pitches but it quickly went downhill (there’s a continuing theme developing here).

I was sat next to a designer who just got it, and he knocked me into a cocked hat on a daily basis. It just wasn’t happening for me, every day the CD would say my stuff was meh, nothing I designed was good enough to make the cut. This is one of the single most important learning curves I’ve ever experienced and much later I drew upon this and got my act together and practised design properly. I didn’t hit my stride until my thirties and I’m still learning. Ultimately, I was fired from tictoc after my boss went through my emails. I was naive but desperate to get out of there.

5. Senior Designer – I joined The Curious Group after a stint of freelance. It was a fun place to work and nobody took anything very seriously, least of all the directors. I’ve learned that the quiet, studious agencies do the best work but the noiser, relaxed agencies are more fun to be in. I guess it’s about striking a balance between the two. In hindsight, if I’d stayed on at school and gone to Glasgow School of Art I’m pretty sure I’d be where I am today anyway. I just took a long, messy road to get here.

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We’ve asked professionals in creative industries what jobs they have had in the past to get their foot through the door (or at least pay the rent). For more in the “My First 5 Jobs” series look here.