The Northern Block

South Yorkshire based designer Jonathan Hill has worked extensively throughout the UK in the last decade, yet has longed to establish himself in his local town of Barnsley. Graduating from Newcastle College of Art & Design in 1994, he began the daunting prospect of finding his first job in the design industry. At this time the country was in the middle of an economic recession causing a serious employment problem for all fledgling designers. Combine this with the emerging use of new technology and you get a designer with no valuable experience and with out dated skills. This is the point where you find out what you are really made of. Resolve and ingenuity can make all the difference between stacking supermarket shelves and forging a career path as a professional designer. Having spent 5 years studying design at college Jonathan went back to what he knew best.... learning. College may not give you everything you need for the professional world but it teaches you the ability to learn.

Starting from scratch he taught himself everything he needed to know to be able to go out into the real world and find employment. This included learning software packages inside out, studying business acumen, and generally becoming a self reliant designer.

He set up as a freelancer in 1996 producing music venue posters for the Leadmill in Sheffield. This gave him valuable experience of winning new work, handling clients and being able to work under his own initiative. He developed his creative and technical ability over a two year period before deciding he needed the experience of working in a design studio were he could learn from other designers.

Jonathan joined Mainartery in 1999; a creative design studio based in London working solely for the music industry. He was thrown in at the deep end and soon realised there were serious gaps in his design knowledge. At first this experience was intimidating, confronted by articulate and experienced individuals well grounded in the practice of design. A lot of new designers lose their way at this stage. Jonathan soon recognised that this was his apprenticeship and that the best way to learn was to ask for help (most designers are really helpful).

After 18 months of working in a high-pressure environment as the junior designer, he became a vital contributing member of the team producing a variation of music packaging work for clients such as Universal, EMI and Polydor Records. This lead to a promotion to the creative director's assistant where he would be involved in the company's front-end projects.

With an enviable list of design briefs to work on, Jonathan began to find his own visual personality. He vastly enjoyed this period, producing good work as part of a team unit and having great camaraderie with fellow designers. During this time he produced a high percentage of Mainartery's best projects and helped secure new contracts with various music labels in the dance, electronica and drum and base sector.

However, as many designers find, the path to creative success is often fraught with financial difficulty. The sacrifice for having a job that gives you creative freedom seems to come at a cheap premium. After three and half years in London, Jonathan had debts that could not be supported by his income. The small studio he worked for were unable to provide him with the salary that his experience and ability deserved.

In 2003, Jonathan became Senior Designer for a 3D studio based in Edinburgh working on museums, galleries and interactive environments. This was a huge contrast to the CD packaging work in terms of the size and scale of the designs. Most graphic designers can learn the process of conventional printing needed for CD work within a period of around 18 months. But to go beyond the printed page onto substrates such as glass, metal or even stone takes a resolute individual who is not afraid to make mistakes. He settled into his new role very comfortably expressing creative freedom in both 2D and 3D mediums. Significant work produced included the design of the National Cash Register Solution Centre Head Quarters in Dundee.

After twelve months, Jonathan decided to return back to his homelands of South Yorkshire to pursue setting up his own studio. It would still take another two years of working for various design companies in the Yorkshire and Manchester area before he had sufficient stability to embark on his own project. During this time he expanded his skills to include further packaging, motion, and 3D work.

At the end of 2005 during a lean spell as a freelancer Jonathan was approached to design an exhibition stand for Rotherham Chambers. The company in question had set up a workshop on the new Park Springs industrial estate in Grimethorpe. They needed to find a talented local designer capable of bringing a new and fresh approach to projects. An overdue case of being in the right place at the right time!

In design you get a feeling that it seems the right time to start your own studio. Maybe its age or maybe its recognising that it's time to produce work that is completely your own creative and business responsibility.

At present Jonathan is keeping things solo under the title The Northern Block.  Under this title, he will be offering a highly creative design experience that covers four disciplines: Print, 3D, Motion and Screen.  The Northern Block is also dedicated to producing new and original typefaces and Jonathan has recently published his first family of fonts, "StealWerks™", an industrial, mechanical font strongly influenced by the British Steel.  Ideal for use on skateboards, BMX's, mountain bikes, snowboards or any object that is subject to harsh treatment, the font is on sale at Myfonts.com and is soon to be available from the Identikal Foundry. 

Future aspirations for The Northern Block and for Jonathan personally, include the development of an e-commerce website, selling original fonts, T-Shirts, Screen-prints, calendars and postcards, amongst other equally 'cool' items.

The work that Jonathan produces evolves from his passion, commitment and love for the projects. Not everyone will like the work he produces, after all, it's an opinion-based discipline and everyone is entitled to their own. The work he does is not one size fits all; it's forged from analyses, research, development, understanding and most importantly, having a client who's fed up with the word 'okay'.

Jonathan Hill
Creative Director

THE NORTHERN BLOCK
13 PARK AVENUE
PENISTONE
SHEFFIELD
S36 6DL

T. 01226 762006
M. 07779159612

E. info@thenorthernblock.co.uk
W. www.thenorthernblock.co.uk