Good Day. I graduated from DevStudios this past February, top of my class, with honours, and I thought that meant I was ready. Then I spent the spring and summer printing a racetrack, eighteen hours a day, and I learned what ready actually means.
A man named Corey Gauveau interviewed me and hired me on the spot. He promised I would be well fed, well managed, and handed the experience of a lifetime, and every part of that turned out to be true. On my first day he passed me a red binder, a hundred pages thick, and said, in effect, these are the client orders, everyone who paid for track graphics and sponsor signage and paddock and booth space, so call them, find out what they need, design it, print it, and go. That was the entire brief. Trial by fire, in the best way a young designer could ask for.
The job was the inaugural West Edmonton Mall Grand Prix at the City Centre Airport, the first time open-wheel racing has come to Edmonton, a temporary circuit laid across the runways in our own backyard. I handled the graphics. All of them. Track graphics, wayfinding, the grandstand banners, the client signage, the markings on the tarmac, the thousand things a crowd of two hundred thousand never once thinks about, precisely because they are done well. Windship Aviation, the company that took me on, builds hot air balloons the rest of the year, and I was meant to be initiated with a balloon of my own, except I was too buried in print to stop for it.
We had a printer ten feet wide, and I have never been so intimate with a machine. The largest pieces ran sixty feet long and forty feet tall, several of them, the grandstand banners, and at that scale a misaligned file is not a small mistake on a screen. It is an enormous banner that is wrong, in front of everyone, with no undo. I learned to respect the timeline I had drawn, and to hold it even as clients kept adding to that binder.
It rained on opening day, hard, the way Alberta rains in July. I stood at the edge of the paddock with water running off the brim of my hat and watched everything we had made get tested by weather and crowd at the same moment. Some of it I would do differently. Most of it held.
And then the cars. We had access to the pits, and a vantage over the back corner that fed into them, and I want to try to tell you what it is to stand a few feet from a Champ Car at full song. These machines lose their grip if they go too slow, so a driver comes into the pit at a brutal speed and brakes at the last possible instant, landing each tire on a square barely an inch across. Precision at that velocity, chosen on purpose, three feet from where I stood. Everything I had been taught about composition and hierarchy suddenly had a heartbeat.
Three months of eighteen hour days will strip the school right out of you and leave only the craft. I came out the far side knowing things no classroom teaches: that a deadline is a form of respect, that scale changes absolutely everything, and that the work the crowd never notices is the work holding the whole day up. I am twenty-two years old, and I have printed a racetrack. I do not believe I will ever be intimidated by a brochure again.
Something is shifting in this trade, too, and I can feel the edge of it. The web is becoming a real place to do the work, not merely an afterthought bolted to the print. Standing on that tarmac, watching machines built for one purpose move faster than anything I had ever seen, I had the distinct feeling that our own tools are about to start moving like that, and I mean to be ready when they do.
The grandstands are coming down now. The runway is a runway again. And I am keeping a photograph of that ten-foot printer, because whatever I become in this work, it started here, at the track, in the rain, three feet from something extraordinary.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · July 2005