Exeter's unassuming co-op worker leads double life as 'Lord of the Logos'(www.devonlive.com)
194 pointsby summoned10 days ago16 comments
  • columb10 days ago
    My time to shine! I used to work with Krzysiu (Krzysztof). He used to have MySpace popular page and he was designing logos for heavy-metal bands - sometimes (if not always) for free. Really nice guy. Oh, and Exeter got to the front page...

    Cześć Krzysiu! Pozdrawiam (We used to work at COOP HB)

    • mattl9 days ago
      Wasn’t expecting to see Exeter on the homepage for sure.
      • xanderlewis9 days ago
        Wasn't expecting to see the Co-op.
      • dotBen9 days ago
        Is there a tech scene in Exeter? I have long lived in San Francisco having moved from UK in 2006 but I spent a lot of time down in Devon where my parents now live.
        • rc559 days ago
          There is a tech scene in Exeter for sure, check out these:

          - https://techexeter.uk - they've been running events for many years now, 1500 members and monthly meetups.

          - https://bsidesexeter.co.uk - Infosec events - some members formerly of the local DEFCON group (those events were fun).

          - Shameless plug https://novaparty.org - Annual demoscene event (this year will be 13-15th June) run in collaboration with Tech Exeter.

          • nextos9 days ago
            Would Exeter be a good location, in comparison to the home counties, to set up a startup where most employees WFH 90% of the time?

            I really like the area, and my preferred locations in Oxon & Cambs are getting incredibly expensive in terms of real estate, which doesn't make sense in case of WFH.

        • heeton9 days ago
          I wouldn’t call it a scene, but there’s a small handful of people and the occasional meet-up or event. I’m near Exeter after working in London for ~10 years.

          Hi to anyone else who’s down in Devon :)

          (Hit me up via my profile if you’d like to grab a coffee)

        • mattl9 days ago
          Heh, not sure. I moved to the US in 2008. I think you and I talked about this when you were at WordCamp Boston when you were doing stuff with WPEngine.

          I think at least one of the W3C staff is in Devon.

          • dotBen9 days ago
            wow you have a much better memory than I do, I don't even remember anything about the event (tbf for several years I used to attend a WordCamp somewhere practically every other week!)
            • mattl9 days ago
              Yeah, you’ve been to approximately 9000 of them and I’ve been to less than five.
        • dcsan8 days ago
          Richard bartle and the original MUD came out of Exeter uni AI program. Until this week he was a game design prof there too. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartle_taxonomy_of_player_type...
        • physicsguy9 days ago
          Not really, there’s a bit of one in Bristol, but from what I see of job postings down there, salaries aren’t that high, comparable to much of the rest of the U.K. outside of London

          The MetOffice has their software stuff down in Exeter but it’s <£45k for people with experience in scientific computing and HPC

  • sieste9 days ago
    Funny to see this on the front page. When my son was a baby, I carried him in a sling and got my morning coffee from Christophe in the coop next door. Every day he greeted me with "It's the tired kangaroo man!"
  • y429 days ago
    yeah I tried to read the article, but somehow it's hard to see the content beyond a full screen ad inside a modal, a second modal asking me to allow notifications, an inline WhatsApp banner, a fixed ad in the footer,four display ads fencing the first paragraph and at this point I kind of gave up.
    • PaulRobinson9 days ago
      Reach - the publishing group that owns a lot of local papers as well as some national titles in the UK, such as the Daily Express and the Mirror - has run their online portfolio into the ground. All their paper websites are like this, and staff have been complaining for some time that their content is getting buried under adtech noise. Worse, the writers have page view targets - no wonder morale there is so poor.
      • dcsan8 days ago
        The revenue has been sucked out of the publications pushing them into options like this. Craig's fortune was redirected from somewhere in a zero sum ecosystem. LLM searches making it far worse. I hope micropayments for original content work out but that's a pipe dream so far
    • switch0079 days ago
      It's an ad blocker testing site that occasionally has some news
    • wffurr9 days ago
      Yeah this seems like a fun article but it's buried under way too much adtech crud, and Chrome Android has no "reader view" I can find. Maybe I need a better user agent that actually respects the user.
      • Liquix9 days ago
        Iceraven is an unofficial fork of Firefox for Android maintained by Mozilla, allows installation of desktop extensions (full uBlock origin): https://github.com/fork-maintainers/iceraven-browser
        • mkl9 days ago
          Firefox Android supports uBlock Origin just fine (I didn't see a single ad or modal in this article). There is no need for obscure forks, and Iceraven is "Definitely not brought to you by Mozilla!", as the first sentence on the page says.
    • dcsan8 days ago
      Reader mode in mobile? But then maybe you lose some graphics
    • GardenLetter279 days ago
      Why aren't you using Firefox with uBlock Origin?
  • kilpikaarna9 days ago
    Legend! Seems like he might be a bit of a savant type though. Sad to hear that he's working at a supermarket. He started getting attention about a decade ago thanks to social media and had an artbook published, but despite his cult status and having some big name clients he would charge like 30 bucks to draw them a logo.
    • Freak_NL9 days ago
      > Sad to hear that he's working at a supermarket.

      I wouldn't be too hasty to call someone's job sad, unless they actually hated it.

      From the article:

      > […] Christophe relies on the steady income of his job at the Co-op serving customers. He is contracted to do 12 to 20 hours a week, […]. He said: "The reason I will never be able to fulfil my dream to be living exclusively off my art is because of the competition there now is so I have to have two sources of income.

      And specifically:

      > "Working at the Co-op also helps me maintain contact with the outside world as otherwise you can be immersed in your own art world. As long as my tummy is full and I have a roof over my head, that is the most important thing."

      • anticorporate9 days ago
        I worked at a food co-op for the first three years of my career. After spending the next dozen or so years in tech, I'm now reapplying to co-op grocery jobs.

        Money isn't everything.

        • manarth9 days ago
          Although it's nominally and legitimately a "co-operative", the Co-Op in question is a large national supermarket chain in the UK.

          Working there is like working any retail job, and a far cry from a small community co-op.

          • PaulRobinson9 days ago
            Traces its roots to the Rochdale pioneers. I'd say it's not just "a" co-op, it's likely the oldest in existence on Earth.

            But yeah, working there is not going to be too much different to working at any other store.

            Still, don't underplay that. Having something you can go to, walk away from without having to bring home any work, get your 30-40 hours/week (and they'll pay a decent living wage), so you can pay the bills and keep your creative energy for your art... it's not a bad way to be.

            • cartoffal9 days ago
              The Co-op in Sandwich, Kent is still locally known as the Pioneer!
        • vvpan9 days ago
          As they say - name checks out. I have been really into the idea of cooperatives lately. It is a topic that deserves more light seeing the extreme centralization of corporate wealth. Sadly most non-legal info about co-ops out there always goes back to Mondragon. There needs to be more media about non-corporate organizations. US farming and electrification was largely driven cooperatives, for example, but one rarely hears much about it.
          • memhole9 days ago
            I personally like cooperatives too. I’ve always wondered if instead of a tech union a cooperative might be a better fit. No solution is perfect, though. Lots of people want to make an income and not deal with the now governance part of their job. You also have people that are attracted to those kinds of organizations who also desire the governance part. Which goes back to the trope about those that should have authority don’t often want it.
        • bongodongobob9 days ago
          Yeah money isn't everything after you made a bunch. What.
          • beacon2949 days ago
            Well, our society defaults many people to serving money so having escaped the immediate serfdom of debt and even short term cashflow, people can make more balanced choices.
            • anticorporate9 days ago
              This was me. I loved my co-op job, but I had no family money and no prospect of ever being able to buy a home on that income.

              I worked in tech long enough to pay off debts, put a down payment on a house, and no longer have to live in fear of a minor crisis bankrupting me. I didn't got rich, I stayed long enough that after leaving tech I could continue to work a normal job until normal retirement age - the thing that used to be in reach for the working class, but no longer is. The continue pursuit of money beyond a basic safety net wasn't worth the harm.

              I still love technology. I have no love for the tech industry.

    • nobodyandproud9 days ago
      He does what he loves while without having to be “hungry” or an unstable lifestyle and unpredictable.

      That sounds like the definition of success to me.

    • 0xbadcafebee9 days ago
      I wish I worked a simple manual labor job like a supermarket. It's just hard to make a living wage, savings, retire, pay for unexpected high costs for transportation or health care, and I wouldn't be able to travel. Otherwise it would be great. Stacking boxes all day? Helping customers with their bags? Doing inventory? Checking people out at the register? A simple job where I don't have to sit in a chair, can plan, organize, do rote manual tasks, socialize, and help people? Sign me up. Heck I might even do it part time when I retire.
  • lukecarr9 days ago
    A DevonLive article on HN: this must be one of the four horsemen!
  • treetalker10 days ago
    Logos as in corporate designs, not Greek / Christian logos.
    • brendoelfrendo10 days ago
      "Corporate designs" is technically accurate, but more specifically he primarily makes logotypes for heavy metal bands and other musical acts. A very cool, inspired pursuit.
    • A_D_E_P_T10 days ago
      Yeah I totally thought this was going to be about some new religious or spiritual movement.
    • IshKebab9 days ago
      Heavy metal logos, not corporate logos.
  • senderista9 days ago
    Emperor's logo is indeed iconic. Shame that just like most of the bands he's made logos for, he can't live on his art.
  • dmje9 days ago
    Ah, town of my teen years, hidden under 300 pop ups and adspam
  • shermantanktop9 days ago
    Is this guy why every metal band logo looks like a bundle of twisted sticks? Or maybe he’s just particularly successful at it.
    • darkwater9 days ago
      This style is mainly used by black metal and death metal bands, not every heavy metal one.
    • starkparker9 days ago
      no, he's just part of a long evolution of metal logos from the 1980s, particularly Mayhem: https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Mayhem/67

      this article kind of glances on Christophe's Emperor logo, which was 1994, but it was also just part of the chain of influences

    • jccalhoun9 days ago
      People seem to like the style but I find them virtually unreadable.
      • jlarocco9 days ago
        Same here. I think they look kinda neat, but I can't read them to save my life.
        • arp2428 days ago
          The obscurity and inaccessibility is kind of the point, at least for some of the Black Metal bands.
  • flippant10 days ago
    Archived copy

    https://archive.is/JbtH8

  • m46310 days ago
    so exeter co-op is a grocery store?
    • FearNotDaniel10 days ago
      Yes. Exeter is a city in England. Co-op (short for “co-operative”) is a chain of grocery stores that was originally founded on principles of shared ownership [0].

      [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Co-operative_brand

      • kristianp9 days ago
        Pronounced "coo-op" or "cwop", depending on your accent.
        • funnybeam9 days ago
          “Ko op” where I’m from, never heard it pronounced any other way

          Rhymes with no-op

    • AndrewDucker10 days ago
      Co-op is a UK supermarket chain and the brand used for the food retail business of The Co-operative Group, one of the world's largest consumer co-operatives.

      This is the Exeter branch.

      • mattl9 days ago
        There’s multiple different businesses doing business as “the co-op” in the UK IIRC, somewhat based on geography but with different branding too.
        • gerdesj9 days ago
          There are these ones in the UK these days:

          https://www.co-operative.coop/about-us/history https://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/about-us/

          When a Brit talks about "The Co-op", they (we) mean the stores. The bank always has bank appended to its name.

          • rad_gruchalski9 days ago
            There's also the funeral care: https://www.coop.co.uk/funeralcare.
            • gerdesj9 days ago
              Good catch.

              My New Year's promise this year was to be more demonstrably accurate than last year and I seem to have screwed it up already.

              Bugger.

              • mattl9 days ago
                You can see here what I'm talking about:

                https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-op_Food

                Different groups of co-operatives sharing "The Co-Op" brand with different but similar branding.

                Co-op Food in Devon vs other parts of the UK will be run by a different group.

                I went down a Wikipedia hole on this the other day.

                • Doctor_Fegg9 days ago
                  Indeed. Sometimes you’ll have two Co-ops from different groups right next to each other: Shipston-on-Stour has a Midcounties Co-op two doors down from a Co-operative Group Co-op. Both are externally branded Co-op, they sell many of the same Co-op branded products, and they don’t take each other’s loyalty/dividend card.
        • tonyedgecombe9 days ago
          Yes, a village near us has two close by and competing, a mid-counties co-op and a food co-op.
  • croisillon9 days ago
    What a horrible ad and spam drenched website, poor Devonians :(
    • tonyedgecombe9 days ago
      It seems every county in the UK has one of these sites, it's part of Reach plc (formerly Trinity Mirror).

      This particular article is about as engaging as it gets.

    • ninalanyon7 days ago
      Firefox + uBlock cures that.
      • croisillon7 days ago
        that's correct but i opened it on my iphone (safari)
  • 9 days ago
    undefined
  • fitsumbelay9 days ago
    very cool story
  • arpinum10 days ago
    I'll pop in tomorrow and see if he does corporate logos
  • curtisszmania10 days ago
    [dead]