In 1991, after being told by his tutors at Chelsea College of Art and Design that he ‘wasn’t good enough’ to become an artist, John Dowling realised he needed a change of direction. When someone encouraged him to pursue Graphic Design, he went for it although does admit to not knowing exactly what it was at the time. In the years since then he’s learnt in no uncertain terms what it means to be a graphic designer and has honed his skills at some of the most prestigious agencies around.

Starting his employment at the now defunct Area (a studio established by two former designers from Peter Saville Associates) John went on to stints at the almighty Pentagram, SEA and Frost before setting up Dowling Duncan alongside his former Pentagram colleague Rob Duncan. They’ve used their wealth of experience to produce a great body of work for clients such as AIGA, Apple, The British Museum, Google, John Lewis, Microsoft, The Serpentine Gallery… This list goes on.

John kindly agreed to get involved with our regular Ten Questions series. Here’s what he had to say…

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A retreat to Japan in an attempt to escape London for a while was the starting point for John Paul Thurlow’s best known work. Whilst drawing the contents of his room he came across a travel sized copy of British Elle and recreated the cover as a pencil drawing (amending the title to read ‘Hell’ as an expression of his mood). From that point on John Paul has made it his mission to ‘recreate cover art for every great magazine and record’ he owns. The meticulously intricate drawings are far from perfect reproductions – they are filled with his own additional scrawlings, notes, thoughts, feelings and scribbles to make them a one of a kind piece of art based on a mass produced piece of media.

John Paul was kind enough to take the time out to answer our Ten Questions.

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There has been some internet chatter of late debating whether it’s necessary for designers to learn back-end coding, much of it around Frank Chimero’s Designers vs Coding post which is currently doing the rounds. Being the all-knowing opinion formers that we are, we couldn’t help but let our thoughts be known on the matter.

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