tat* – Inspirational Graphic Ephemera

Tat* – print­ed ephemera – is a bit of a graph­ic designer’s curse. Walk into any design stu­dio and you will see tat pinned to the walls or taped to a com­put­er screen. Even the purist will have a secret cache hid­den away some­where. Design­er Andy Alt­mann col­lect­ed tat for more than 30 years. He found inspi­ra­tion in the ordi­nary, and mag­ic in the mun­dane. Final­ly he decid­ed to share his col­lec­tion with the world. Con­ceived and edit­ed by Andy, this is the ulti­mate source book – the apoth­e­o­sis of tat. A visu­al trea­sure trove, full of sur­pris­es, it should find a place on every graph­ic designer’s desk.

* tat (noun) – any­thing that looks cheap, is of low qual­i­ty, or in poor con­di­tion; junk, rub­bish, debris, detri­tus, crap, shite

Andy Alt­mann (1962−2025) was a found­ing part­ner at Why Not Asso­ciates, one of the UK’s lead­ing mul­ti-dis­ci­pli­nary design com­pa­nies. Although he trained as a graph­ic design­er, Andy’s work typ­i­cal­ly blurred the bound­ary between design and art. His projects ranged from exhi­bi­tion design to postage stamps, via adver­tis­ing, pub­lish­ing, tele­vi­sion titles, com­mer­cials, cor­po­rate iden­ti­ty and large-scale pub­lic art. The com­mon thread was a fun­da­men­tal love of typog­ra­phy, exper­i­men­ta­tion and above all humour. 

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