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She’s only just graduated from AUT’s masters programme in illustration, but Nadeesha Godamunne has been questioning the boundaries of her discipline for some time. She first came to public attention last year after winning the Style Pasifika Supreme Award with a collection of three simple slip dresses that used a mixture of technology and handcraft to create a trompe l’oeil effect, fooling the eye into seeing a series of layered garments.

In 2009 Godamunne taught AUT’s first– and second-year fashion illustration programme while completing her masters degree. “You’d be surprised how many students don’t understand proportion or the human body,” she says. “When you take a drawing to the pattern maker, they’ll do exactly what you draw, and if it’s not drawn properly it’ll come out wrong. Collars, for example, are very hard to get right. It’s miscommunication in an industry where drawing well is really important in terms of your outcome and how to express what you want.”

Generally, Godamunne takes her cues from fine artists. For her Trompe L’oeil collection it was the cubists, and last year, she drew on the twisted forms of early twentieth-century
artist Egon Schiele, a protégé of Gustave Klimt. Lately, however, she’s looked at present-day London-based designers Julie Verhoeven and Gladys Palmer.

“It’s more contemporary,” she says. “It’s more linear and a lot of the detail is edited out.”

Another direction has been the move into social commentary spurred by her thesis project on Fashion Week, when Godamunne turned a satirical eye on the backstage world of the fashion industry. “Last year my illustrations were very traditional in fashion terms,” she says. “This year, I’ve put it into a context, using the figure in her surroundings, so I’ve been drawing bar scenes or trees or incorporating lighting from the spotlights in the show.”

William Hogarth and James Gillray, both eighteenth-century satirical painters, are probably not the most obvious point of reference for a 23-year-old fashion illustrator, but, says Godamunne, the use of caricature and the enduring way the artists incorporated humour in paintings about contemporary social mores were a big influence on the way she approached the project.

“I worked as an illustrator, rather than as a fashion illustrator,” she says. Having recently joined an agency, the illustrator is venturing into commercial work, although she has already contributed editorial illustrations to various magazines and for fashion labels.

“My style is so distinct I have to be cautious that I don’t pigeonhole myself. Once I go out to industry I’ll be experimenting with different styles and media so people don’t think I’m a one-trick pony. I’m looking forward to getting outside my comfort zone.”

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In the last issue of ProDesign, issue 108, we published a series of small stories on stamp designs (see image gallery below) by the Assignment Group, Inhouse Design and Bananaworks. While we were focussed on the designs of these stamps, one reader, Paul van Herpt, from Christchurch, has written in with some notes on the functional requirements and the move away from the traditional purpose of stamps. Van Herpt's letter follows:

Dear Sir,

STAMPS OF APPROVAL – PRODESIGN ISSUE 108

I note there generally is no section in your magazine for Letters to the Editor, but felt there is an issue that potentially could use some debate.

The article entitled “Stamps of Approval” focused on the design input as would be expected in a magazine for design professionals. However, there was little mention as to the function of the item as a postage stamp, which is effectively a receipt for the payment of a charge for someone to deliver correspondence between people. The stamp was the receipt, and the they were then postmarked to both indicate when and where the item came from and to prevent reuse. There are also Universal Postal Union (UPU) rules and guidelines for postage stamps used on mail between countries.

In recent years this does not appear to have been the prime driver to the design of stamps. The majority of commemorative stamps such as those depicted in the article, are in Post Shops for no more than 3 weeks so the average user of the service never gets to use the item for the intended purpose.  The market for these items tends to be sold directly to the collector without ever being used which NZ Post does through its philatelic sales centre in Wanganui.

This is only part of the market, as there are also many who collect not just the stamp, but the complete envelope with its various postal markings and are interested in the where and when for which clear postmarkings are required. Looking at the stamps in the article, how would current postal markings deface these designs. In the Ross Dependency issue the marking would likely be through the text and the dark landmass outline making neither particularly clear to read. The colours of the Expo 2010 Shanghai series do not appear to have considered postmarking, nor the ongoing market for these items having been wrapped around an envelope as the designer states was his intention. What condition would used stamps be in a collection after having been through the postal service ? The stamps would be scuffed in the middle section where they wrap over the envelope once they have been through the mechanised sorting and postmarking equipment in the postal sorting centre.

The issue is that should we be considering these items as miniature works of art, or are they still postage stamps. If the later, then surely they need to function across the full spectrum of their use and collectability. After all, if collectors stopped collecting new stamps, there would be no need to either produce or design more. So there is an element of function that should be considered in the design, which does not rate a mention in the article, nor the designer’s statements. If there are a work of art then of course there is much greater design freedom but also a different market for the end product.

For full consideration of function, the designer will need the appropriate briefing from their client, so this letter is intended to highlight an element of frustration from the user /market viewpoint to provoke some consideration of it rather than critique the designers in these stamp issues.

Regards

Paul van Herpt, ANZIA

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For a girl who owns the URL ‘iamobsessedwithmycats.com’ (it redirects to her website) and describes her life as “a solitary existence where nobody showers and you get covered in cat hair”, Jessica Hische is actually a remarkably charming and talented young woman, all be it with a slight feline fetish.

She opened the show at Semi-Permanent this year and provided the audience with just the jump start they needed, real inspiration powered on by youthful enthusiasm for her craft, which is of course lettering, illustration and more recently type design. She began by taking us through some of her student work which, being only twenty-five, was somewhat recent and provided the audience with a good insight into how she entered the industry, not to mention providing a wonderful showcase for her eccentric sense of humour. This showed particularly in the board game she designed as a take on ‘The Game of Life’ only she named it ‘The Game of Divorce’ where you had to choose who to live with, mum or dad.

This may seem like student banter but humour is a great thing in illustration, she laughed, “there’s nothing people like more than dogs doing human things” — except possibly cats doing human things hey Jessica? But it’s not all fun and games. It’s obvious Hische has worked extremely hard to get to where she is today, and at such a young age too. She worked as designer after university for three years for Headcase and Louise Fili before going freelance and has now worked for everyone from the Boston Globe to the publishers of the Twilight novels.

At present Hische is working more and more in font design. She’s designed her first font ‘Buttermilk’ but still approaches the subject with the same humble attitude – talking of how the old type masters mock her when she doesn’t know the terminology. Personally, I’m not sure that matters when you can produce such beautiful pieces of work. A fine example of this is her current work illustrating the book covers of classic novels of the past.

This girl seems to have the world at her feet and she certainly has talent in her fingertips but it was her enthusiasm that really won me over. As designers we all face ‘challenges’ on a daily basis but she had the ability to laugh it off. She said she should make a book of all the bad art direction she has ever received, her favourite being “don’t make the fish look left it’s depressing.” She’s even seen her type on retro romance novels and, not only that; she loved the idea of this. She showed us the result and it looked nothing like she intended, but I think at this point she had won over the audience with her enthusiasm. It really was a bad romance novel but all she could say was “its every girl’s dream to have their type next to shiny lady leg.” Of course it is Jessica!

More:
Read a ProDesign interview with  Jessica Hische
Read Emma Parnell's review of Katrin Sonnleitner's Semi-Permanent talk

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It’s a deceptively simple idea, but a stroke of genius when it comes to self-promotion. A young Brooklyn-based type designer leaves her day job to go freelance in September 2009, and needs a personal project to keep her motivated and show off her skills. Blogging? It’s been done. Online portfolio? Already got one. So the designer, who draws every new alphabet by hand, vows to create one new letter every working day — a decorative drop cap. After a brainstorming session with friends, she also decides to make each letter available for online use only, “for the beautification of blog posts everywhere” — a sort of open-source style dictionary.  Ten months later and with a target 12 alphabets on their way to completion, the Daily Drop Cap is keeping people engaged with what designer, illustrator and typographer Jessica Hische is producing, while keeping the spotlight on what she’s good at and allowing her to set her own agenda.

“I realised it wasn’t just making the letters that would make it popular, it was making it more interactive and allowing people to re-use the drop caps,” says Hische. “I’ve had unbelievable amounts of feedback. Months and months later, people are still sending me stuff, and I get so much traffic because of people posting about it on different blogs. What I thought would be a side project has been helpful for my other projects as well.”

Just twenty-five, Hische (“just like ‘fish’ but with an H”) says the Daily Drop Cap project has also encouraged potential clients to overlook her comparative youth.

“It was a hindrance at first, being young,” she says. “But I got so much exposure that people now just take me seriously, as well as taking it as an inspiration for how quickly you can do things.”

And, given the way she works, Hische is quick. It can take her as little as a couple of hours to draw a new typeface, though her first commercial font, Buttermilk, was three months in development (on and off). Her trademark vintage-look, hand-drawn style is created in Illustrator rather than Fontlab, the preferred software for most typographers as it generates crisp, perfect curves. However, Hische says a bit of wonkiness works better for her.

“I don’t want it to look too mathematical or perfect, or for my work to look like it can be made by anyone,” she says. “Before I started the project I was already pretty fast, but any practice makes you faster, and I make decisions faster. There’s a lot of fine-tuning that happens. It takes me less time now to make a new display font for something than to scour the Internet for something really good.”

As a promotional enterprise rather than a profit-making one, the DDC sits alongside Hische’s identity and book design projects, and her other work as a freelance illustrator. This has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, and often includes her characteristic swirly, vintage-look letters and wry anthropomorphic drawings of animals — such as the one featuring partied-out, passed-out cats produced for the new year’s issue of a financial magazine.

Her calendar is, she says, generally clogged up for four weeks in advance. She gets so many questions emailed to her from students and other designers that she’s created an FAQ section on her website to avoid having to respond to each individually. Hische’s success is, however, not an accident. She spent three years freelancing heavily at night after clocking out of day jobs at Headcase Design in her native Philadelphia (where she worked on, among other things, Dirty Blonde, a compilation of Courtney Love’s scrawled, illustrated diaries) and New York-based studio Louise Fili, which specialises in packaging, restaurant and book design.

Hische admits that, right now, she has five new drop caps to catch up on, but says that coming up with new ideas has never been a problem. “I never know what I’m going to do until I sit down, which can be intimidating. But I always want to do something completely different to what I’ve already done. It’s always good to know what you don’t want to do — given limitations I tend to do better. I actually thought I would be more experimental than I have been, so I’m going to push myself more for the last ones.”

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ProDesign \\ Sarah, how did you get into illustration?
Sarah Larnach \\ Two years ago I found myself simultaneously making ‘fan art’ portraits for a book by Amanda Maxwell, and embarking on the My Delirium Video for Ladyhawke. It didn’t occur to me that these were ‘illustration jobs’, perhaps because they were collaborative, rather than being client initiated. The directors on the ‘My Delirium’ video for Ladyhawke had a background in illustration, and working with them showed me that there was more to illustration than I was aware of. In London on that project, it seemed like everyday I was being asked what agency I was with, and what other jobs I had done. Illustration wasn’t something I had really thought about, but it reached out and grabbed me by the throat. While I was investigating potential artist agencies, I was approached by International Rescue in NZ, and I went with them because I dug their vision and attitude.

'My Delirium' watercolour.

Ladyhawke watercolour.

PD \\ Tell me a little about the Haiti t-shirt project?
SL \\ Dave from Closet Tee’s approached me to contribute an image. I believe that Dave was aware of the ‘Art Loves Haiti’ auctions I had facilitated to raise funds, and was aware of the personal link that I had to Haiti – my stepsister Emily Sanson-Rejouis lost her dear husband and two young daughters in the tragedy. Contributing to the Closet fundraiser was a desperate necessity for me. I commend Closet for the huge amount of time and resources they donated to raise funds, and for the smart idea which gives folks a great quality tee shirt in return for a donation to Oxfam.

Larnach's design for Closet Tees heart Haiti project.

PD \\ Looking at some of your work it seems you have a thing for watercolours, wolves, cats and dinosaurs…

SL \\ Well, I respond the most to figurative image, so that’s what I like to paint. I use ‘creatures’ a lot as they have less baggage than humans; it’s unlikely that you’re going too look at a Triceratops and think, “would you just look at those sad eyes… I wonder – did he have a rough childhood? Such a shame”. Unless that’s what I want you to see. The cats were an early Ladyhawke thing, and were done because Eleanor Abernathy, aka The Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons, shares an uncanny likeness with Ladyhawke, and it was the eccentricity of a cat lady that we hoped to suggest. The cats got fun when I started making them do stuff; like dressing as ghosts… but we soon ventured too close to cutes-ville. The logical and mature progression was to wolves – way more tough than cats, and dinosaurs – who invented tough. It is very difficult to get too cute on a dinosaur, even if it’s dressed up for Halloween.

Desert Cats illustration.

T Rex.

Wolf illustration.

Racoon illustration.

PD \\ How did you get involved with Ladyhawke?
SL \\ Pip (Ladyhawke) and I have enjoyed a collaborative relationship for years; we DJ’d together when I was in art school, and moved to Sydney together when she was creating Ladyhawke. Pip has been my muse and has always helped me to identify the strengths in my work. She has a degree in design, so her visual representation was always very important to her and as we worked well together and she had a lot of faith in my work… I guess that my working on Ladyhawke projects was a given. I helped her and now she’s helping me.

Ladyhawke.

PD \\ What’s the concept behind the work?
SL \\ We were looking to portray a woman isolated in her unique version of reality. Always, she is a bit disturbed and above all, alone. All the writing on the album is done by hand, in a messy scratchy scrawl. The album and its singles were to have conscious synergy; when you picked up a copy of the Ladyhawke album, you should find that the only thing not hand-done is the barcode. I even re-painted the record company logos.  We had hoped that the craft, devotion and dedication would shine through, adding a physical weight to a record that people would love to paw over and hold as they listened… as we have done with our favourite records.
Creating a record for collectors was important to Pip and I, as we have both been obsessive about collections ourselves. There’s no romance in checking out someone’s digital collection, and less potential to educate your kids, or let them explore for themselves, without a physical/visual dimension to music – this is how we both got into music, and album cover obsession. The Ladyhawke vinyl comes with an iTunes download code, which I believe is a very smart way to combine the interests of the visual collector with aural convenience.
The first artwork done was the cover piece; Pip alone in her chaotic utopian apartment, surrounded by the cables powering her games and music studio. Some pieces reference movies we like, for example, the one of Pip dressed in a sheet-as-cheap-ghost-costume is from Beetlejuice. When I couldn’t have Pip model for a picture, I would bring in a cat as her body double. The album booklet is one continuous image; in reality it’s a two-metre wide painting, where the cast of characters from the album single covers are revisited.

Artic illustration.

PD \\ Your work is also gracing beer bottles these days? How did that happen?
SL \\ Becks Bier UK has been releasing an artist series annually for the last 22 years. The theme for the 2009 series was ‘Music Inspired Art’, and Becks sought out two known artist\musician collaborators who have represented that theme. I think that Pip saw this as terrific exposure for my work, so she accepted the opportunity on my behalf. My paintings were based on taxidermy tableau, as you would see in natural history museums, there are some diorama style paintings with display case frames, and other ominous scenes with wolves and falcons and creepy trees. Where Pip appears she’s blindfolded and looking rather ‘hunted’. It might be appropriate to suggest that the series is a little gothic. I was commissioned to do six paintings, which became two labels on a run of 20 million bottles, six-pack and slab boxes, billboard, phone booth and taxicab decal adverts. I left London the day after the launch party and never saw the campaign in person… nor do I have a single bottle from those millions!

Becks and Ladyhawke.

Becks and Ladyhawke.

Ladyhawke / wolves.

– MB

Links:
internationalrescue.com
sarahlarnach.blogspot.com
closet.co.nz

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Elite Styles – poster. This poster for an elegant Dior-style dress has Coolahan comparing rose-patterned cloth with fine bone china. 1962.

The fashion illustration of Kate Coolahan feels uncannily familiar, though few of us would remember her name. These are the pick of the bunch of fashion plate drawings that lit up Australasian newspapers and magazines in the middle of the 20th century – when the dreams that are dresses were sold with illustrations rather than photography.
Coolahan emigrated to New Zealand in 1952, where she turned an already bright Sydney career as an “advertising and publicity designer” into a long-running stint as New Zealand’s leading fashion illustrator – before making a name for herself as an artist-printmaker.

Her hallmark was a masterful combination of efficiency and sensuality. She could draw from life (a colleague modelling the just-delivered new clothing range) and before dawn would have drafted evocative images that leapt off the page. Her goal was to make the clothing irresistible and get wealthy women to lift the phone and order a fitting.
Her combination of artistry and commercial chutzpah speaks for itself in the images. She was an admirer of the pen and wash work of Erica Perl, who illustrated for US store Lord and Taylor. Coolahan looked for Perl’s key ingredient, to mix into her own developing style. It was backgrounds, she realised. Perl set all her women in the street – street lights, pavements, women walking dogs, the Lord and Taylor shop in the distance.

Kate Coolahan sometime around the 1950s.

Ball gowns: an example of Coolahan’s early wor. An illustration for a newspaper advertisement for Farmers and Co., Sydney (ca. 1951).

While New Zealand clients resisted major pictorial elements – telling Coolahan to keep the space for copy – she worked to find ways to bring mood into her images, even within the strict confines of the local market. New Zealand women wouldn’t enter a shop to look at a dress unless they’d been shown the last detail. Coolahan recalls her boss was rung once by a customer saying they were going to sue the store because the illustration showed eight buttons down the front of the garment, and when she got there, there were only six.

The Art of Eve – catalogue. These are the opening pages from a catalogue for a range of swimwear using new latex fabrics. Models for clothing and swimsuits were usually young teenagers – with small 14” waists, minimal hips and breasts. 1961.

The Art of Eve – catalogue. 1961.

Kate didn’t mind the pragmatism at the heart of commercial illustration, although she could have done without the snobbery prevalent in the New Zealand art world, which looked down on those who earned a living from advertising.
But she had never minded swimming against the tide. Born in Sydney in 1929, she opted for a five-year illustration course at East Sydney Technical College, when her father told her the family couldn’t support her through tertiary education. There she found herself mixing with many returned servicemen, who introduced their sheltered female counterparts to the off-limits world of the wharves, bars and brothels. Her working life began against a backdrop of the war’s lasting legacy of psychological and physical damage and shifting attitudes to women – when she married fellow student Max (an injured war returnee 20 years her senior) in 1950, she took the role of main breadwinner while he continued with his photography studies and convalescence.
Coolahan’s first post was with the high-end Sydney store Farmers and Co. There she produced illustrations, posters, packaging and wrapping paper, and developed campaigns
for newspapers and magazines promoting the latest fashion from France and Italy.

The Junior Miss – catalogue. This catalogue sold a range for toddlers through to teenagers. The children Coolahan illustrated were done out of her head. There were few in the country who could illustrate children’s fashion – the established children’s book illustrators worked very slowly in comparison to Kate. 1961.

After seeing her work in Vogue, a Wellington advertising man from J Inglis Wright offered her a job. He was keen to employ her luxury market know-how. The more relaxed lifestyle in New Zealand appealed, especially given her husband’s continued health problems, so she took the position. “Feminism”, she says, “allowed me to come to New Zealand.”
After a couple of years Coolahan shifted to rival firm Carlton Carruthers du Chateau and King, who offered more money and a nurse for her husband. One of their main clients was Lane Walker Rudkin, which she served as advertising and publicity designer. Later in the decade she moved to James Smith Ltd, where she worked on newspaper advertising campaigns.

James Smiths – newspaper advertisement. Coolahan worked with the same principles of composition as in painting “… if there are a group of figures – are they all looking at the same thing? Are they looking at the person buying? The important one is looking at the buyer.” These images leave space for the copy detailing sizes, colours, price and buying opportunities, but still Coolahan found ways to incorporate illustrative elements, particularly favouring plants and creatures (from her many sketch books). 1964.

James Smiths — newspaper advertisement.

James Smiths — newspaper advertisement.

James Smiths – newspaper advertisement. Coolahan worked with the same principles of composition as in painting “… if there are a group of figures – are they all looking at the same thing? Are they looking at the person buying? The important one is looking at the buyer.” These images leave space for the copy detailing sizes, colours, price and buying opportunities, but still Coolahan found ways to incorporate illustrative elements, particularly favouring plants and creatures (from her many sketch books). 1964.

In the 1960s, Coolahan made the considered choice to move away from fashion illustration (which was being overrun by photography) to education and skills development for the industry. She had a long involvement with Wellington Polytechnic – from teaching night classes in anatomy and drawing in 1962 to helping Massey and Victoria Universities develop MA curricula in printmaking and design. She combined teaching roles with freelance graphic design, and exhibited as a fine artist nationally and internationally.
Kate Coolahan is still living in Wellington, although she wrapped up even her private teaching in 2005. She has relished her working life, making her own richly decorated way through a shining commercial and academic career. Of fashion she says “It’s an integral part of human life. What we wear defines the situation into which we’re coming. If you are a girl, you are inspected as soon as you go out the door.”

In Love with Summer? – promotional brochure (freelance work). This post-Beatles style illustration was for a brochure promoting a new Paraparaumu boutique to the Kapiti-based wives of Wellington’s retired industry leaders. The dinner parties demanded a certain standard of dress, so there was a ready market that could only be reached by a direct mail campaign. 1967.

In Love with Summer? – promotional brochure (freelance work).

Flax is fashion – poster. The trend towards less formal fashion shows in this poster for a new range of linen clothing – developed from flax linen grown and produced in Geraldine. 1967.

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Words: Hamish Thompson

Tourist poster, 1960 (40x26.5 inches). “Having arrived only five years earlier it was the part of the country that I was most familiar with … I felt that the view of Wellington harbour looking up towards Ruapehu was an ideal way to depict the country … The poster was designed to be displayed in London Underground stations to draw people to New Zealand – I reduced everything to a simple combination of images so people could study it at length while waiting for the trains to come through.”

My first encounter with Dennis Beytagh was a poster all blue and green and busy – promoting New Zealand’s tourist delights to weary London commuters in the 1960s. The design captivated me, with its feel-alive mix of good humour and acute observation. It turned out the image was the man’s own view of an adopted country – and could almost have been drawn from the front window of the house he built on a steep hillside above Wellington harbour.
Dennis Beytagh is something of a do-it-yourself master. He’s certainly done a lot of it: school in Shanghai, service in the Royal Indian Navy, graphic design in Mayfair studios, furniture featured in Vogue and sold in Sloane Square, lecturing at art schools like St Martins and Hammersmith. His was the era of poster colour, gouache and watercolour rendered painstakingly on artboards with Kodatrace overlays – the artwork for the old ‘double elephant’ size poster for the National Publicity Studios took three weeks to complete.

When he fled England (“I was married with a family of three young children under the age of seven, living in a two-bedroom flat in Parsons Green and facing a post WWII atomic cold war conflict in Europe”), Beytagh turned that ‘can do, will do’ attitude to his advantage.
In New Zealand he found work in advertising agencies but quickly also made himself a name as a freelance designer – and while he may have been a favourite of book publishers, he also turned his hand to tourist posters, industrial products (the first all-NZ electric toothbrush for instance), design courses, and Readers Digest how-to manuals.
In 1957 he bought a section in Wellington’s north-facing hill suburb Roseneath, and spent the weekends cutting a ledge out of its rotten rock to site a three-bedroom house. “In order to pay for the section and the house and the children’s private school fees, and yet give me enough time for my growing freelance commitments during the day, I started working at The Dominion’s newspaper nightshift, wrapping and packing the next morning’s distribution from midnight until 4am, and then delivering some 400 copies each morning in my Morris Minor convertible … which was ideal because, with the hood down, I could throw the papers from the road on to porches and verandas while steering with my knees! This daily routine I kept up for six years.”
During these years Beytagh completed the poster for the London Underground that caught my eye in the Alexander Turnbull Library – I was researching for Paste Up: A Century of New Zealand Poster Art. It was also when he designed many of the books featured on these pages, and The New Zealand Listener masthead. I’ve spent a lot of time looking through New Zealand’s graphic design record in recent years, and Beytagh’s work stands out for its combination of sophisticated draughtsmanship and charm and vigour.

Beytagh's masthead designs included work for the New Zealand Listener.

He’s always been one to rise to a challenge. When commissioned by the National Booksellers Association to design book tokens, year after year after year, he somehow repeatedly managed to find a fresh approach – by turning to photographs of type perhaps, or a mosaic of broken tiles set in wet plaster.

Some of Beytagh's book token designs. Book tokens – 1960–68 In 1960 Roy Parsons (then head of the New Zealand Booksellers Association) commissioned Beytagh to design a book token range, with a novel design due each year. Initial designs were illustrated, with all sorts of innovations coming later as he sought to keep the concepts fresh.

Beytagh made a significant contribution to graphic design training in New Zealand, as one of the founders of the diploma programme at the former Wellington Polytechnic. He taught there, with breaks for sabbaticals and research trips and forays into Readers Digest design editorships in Sydney, for over 20 years.  And in a rare turn on the old maxim of “them that can’t, teach”, he decided that when he couldn’t really “do and teach” anymore, he would instead write: “the advent of computer technology in relation to graphics … and slightly failing eyesight (I was then approaching 60), persuaded me to take the alternative option of communication by words rather than pictures”.
Beytagh has lived in Ohakune since 1974, where he has been involved with local news publications, most recently the Ruapehu Bulletin. I can’t help but wonder, when his neighbours turn the pages of their local rag, if they have any idea of the place their humble scribe occupies in the history of New Zealand design. They would, if they looked, find themselves on the memorable graphic map he drew, nearly 50 years ago – below a snowy Mount Ruapehu.

An adept and versatile designer-illustrator of posters, book jackets, and logotypes in many different styles, Beytagh was sought after by New Zealand publishers. His work is distinguished by expressive typography and integrated design, which creates thematic relationships between text and illustration. From famous works of New Zealand literature – the first edition of Janet Frame’s Owls Do Cry is one of the best dust jackets on any book printed in New Zealand – to how-to guides like Better Bowls, Beytagh’s designs always served the sense of a book

Dennis Beytagh potted curriculum vitae:
Born 1924 Shanghai; 1937 family to Vancouver and England. 1942 joined Royal Navy, served in Normandy; later joined Royal Indian Navy. 1946–49 trained at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts (along with Terence Conran). 1949–1955 in London: industrial designers Raymond Loewy Associates; advertising agency Colman Prentice & Varley; freelance book jacket design (including Collins, Michael Joseph, Heinemann); freelance furniture design; teaching at St Martins School of Art, Regent Street Polytechnic, Hammersmith School of Art, Brighton College of Arts and Crafts. 1955 RMS Rangitane to Wellington, advertising agency J Inglis Wright. 1957 Goldberg Advertising; began freelance design and illustration (including AW&AH Reed, Albion Wright, National Publicity Studios, also RALTA product design). 1959 began involvement with what became Wellington Polytechnic design diploma programme. 1971–74 design editor Australian edition of Readers Digest Repair Manual. 1974 began reporting Turangi & Ruapehu Chronicle. 1978 designer Readers Digest Motoring Guide to Australia. 1983 editor Waimarino Bulletin, later Ruapehu Bulletin.

The hourglass on the cover of From Plymouth to New Plymouth speaks of the trickling progress of migration

Siver Fern with spine at left. One aspect of jacket design that Beytagh paid particular attention to was the spine – he felt that it should be a concentrated version of the front cover. Books in a store, after all, often had to be “judged by their spine”.

Some of Beytagh's dust jacket designs.

With its bright style contrasting with the unexpected subject matter, Heritage Destroyed easily conveys a sense of an idyll been dozered. Freshwater Admiral suggests both leisure and reward – the uniform hung up on a hook and a bounty of mounted fish.

Book jacket and endpaper design – 1964. The Tender Traveller: a New Zealander abroad, by Susan Graham.

Graphic designer, illustrator and educator Dennis Beytagh.

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