Jai Danton is a publishing and graphic designer with over 20 years total experience in the fields of print and digital publishing, advertising and marketing. He’s a versatile and creative artist from scamp to finished artwork – but what make him tick? Here’s a few answers to the questions you hadn’t even thought of yet …

Okay, okay, OKAY – I admit it, not only am I one of those artsy types, I am a ‘foodie,’ too. I had a restaurant a while back, and it both made me and changed my life for the better – don’t get me wrong, I put everything into it; the hours, the sweat, the passion, the graft, but in the long run, it wasn’t meant to be. I am so glad I did it, I express myself through creative means, and food is an art form, not simply a way of staying alive.

“… it’s the here and now, the eccentric, it’s the retro, perhaps the inexplicable – and it’s definitely the unimaginable …”

What an experience it was – a far cry from design! I started designing back in the late eighties as a trainee graphic designer, for a company in Hampshire, called Technigraphics, using paste-up, bromides and Pantone sheets to colourise schematics and the like (they are still producing similar work today). I worked on some interesting projects for companies big and small, from local nursery schools to British Airways, and I loved it, but by 2006, and by then having worked with lots of publishers, publications and media companies, such as PPP, Johnstons Press, Newsquest and a few escapades into marketing and sales; notably in the mid-late 1990s with Haydon Lotus in Wiltshire; back then, the best-performing Lotus car dealership in the UK.

By 2006, having experienced pretty much everything that any market condition (good or bad) could throw at me, I had been made redundant so many times I could no longer count it on one hand. After a second bout of employment with Newsquest Media, and having been made redundant by them for a second time in 2013, this time from the regional studio in Southampton, I threw the towel in; a change of direction was required, hence the foray into food. I’ve never won an award, never wanted to, (actually, I’ve never worked for a company that entered their staff into that sort of thing …) and I’ll never tire of hearing “you’re so talented” – but, I must say, there’s a lot of companies out there that ‘talk the talk’ with regard to rewarding hard work, but don’t deliver. Been there, done that, wise to it, etc.

I have always put a lot of imagination and creativity into my artwork, photography, image processing and layouts. It’s what I naturally do. Some people have a head for numbers and technicality, thinking in figures and binary, whereas I tend to think in pictures. When I’m arranging dates for a calendar, I see the days – apologies for getting deep, but it needs explaining.

I’m not a bad copywriter, either; I know what counts to make things work. I understand the markets from where your customers grow and although it’s impossible to generalise, I get it. Words and pictures. That’s all it boils down to; it’s the here and now, the eccentric, it’s the retro, perhaps the inexplicable – and it’s definitely the unimaginable. That, dear reader, is why you are here, is it not? I can give you all of them.