LINDdesign was founded in 1994 by Gareth Lind. The firm excels in print and web design
services for a wide range of clients, focusing on cultural and environmental organizations, books and the public sector. With an emphasis on typographic excellence and
editorial clarity, Lind cuts through the clutter to deliver messages
with stylish impact.
With over 20 years of design experience, Lind can also craft headlines and slogans that add punch and humour. He has
written copy for the Ministry of Natural Resources, Ampersand Printing
and the River Run Centre. "Good design includes good writing," Lind says. "If form is built around poorly written content, it falters."
What's with the hand?
Successful
design seamlessly merges thought and execution, style and function.
Mastery of a craft starts with the hand. Lind
considered Left-hand Graphics as an alternative business name but opted against it because of the negative connotations -- from "two
left hands" on down to "sinister." Still, his dominant hand is the left
one. Growing up in a world that favours righthandedness accounts in
part for the offbeat point-of-view he brings to his work.
Where's the degree?
Gareth Lind never had time to get one -- he hit the drafting table
running. A self-taught cartoonist, Lind has always
been a quick learner. At 17, his movie-ad satires were printed
regularly in Festival, a Toronto reperatory cinema guide. Using
pen and rub-down Letraset, he gave these spoofs detail and
authenticity.
This didn't pass without notice. Rosanne Baker-Thornley
hired Lind to apprentice with her fledgling design firm, Bakersmith
Graphics. There he learned everything from computer typesetting to laying out pages for print using blue guides, hot wax and hand-drawn keylines. "I value the fact that
I was able to catch the tail-end paste-up," says Lind. "This important knowhow still forms the skeleton of
design today."
In 1988, cartooning again opened a design door.
A meeting to present a comic strip concept led to Lind being hired as
art director of the Toronto weekly Metropolis. (His comic strip was accepted too.) There, designing
a tabloid on Mac SEs with nine-inch screens -- not unlike painting a
landscape through a pinhole -- Lind entered the computer age.
In 1990, he joined his wife Christel Herick in Düsseldof, Germany, where he learned German, worked at a design firm and then
freelanced. In 1993 he and Herick resettled in Guelph. He started LINDdesign and launched a weekly comic strip, Weltschmerz, which ran
in Ontario papers from 1994 to 2008.
In 1996, he became a member of the Registered Graphic Designers of Ontario, the first graphic designers association in North America to be accredited by government.
