Tat* is a bit of a graphic designer's curse. Walk into any design
studio and you will see tat pinned to the walls or placed with loving
care on top of a computer screen. Even the purist will have a secret
cache hidden away somewhere. Andy Altmann began collecting tat while he
was on his Foundation course, getting ready for an interview at St
Martins School of Art. He'd been asked to present a sketchbook, but
worried that he couldn't draw very well, he decided to start a
scrapbook: "I rummaged through the drawers at home and found some
football cards from the late 1960s and early '70s (plenty of Georgie
Best), an instruction leaflet from an old Hoover, Christmas cracker
jokes, and so on. Then I started on the magazines, cutting out images of
anything that interested me. And finally I took myself off to the
college library, where I photocopied things from books before reaching
for the scissors and glue." It was the beginning of a significant
collecting habit. So what it is that makes a piece of graphic tat
interesting? Is it the 'retro' thing - a fascination with a bygone age,
the primitive printing techniques, the naivety of the design, or the use
of color? All of the above, of course, but it's not quite that simple.
"Occasionally people offer me something they've found that they think I
might like", says Andy. "But usually they're wrong - it doesn't excite
me at all. The magic is missing." To a graphic designer, most the
content of this book can safely be regarded as 'bad' design. But there
is some magic in each and every piece that has made Andy either pick it
up off the street, trail through online links, or enter some dodgy
looking shop on the other side of the world just to snap it up. Here
you'll find everything from sweet wrappers to flash cards, from soap
powder boxes to speedway flyers, from wrestling programmes to bus
tickets. More tat than you can shake a stick at. Taken together, it
represents a lifetime of gleeful hunting and gathering. * tat (noun) -
anything that looks cheap, is of low quality, or in bad condition; junk,
rubbish, debris, detritus, crap, shite
