MADE Magazine Summer 2023

Tricia Hilton was raised in Long Crendon a small village near the river Thames. At the time, it was a quiet town with no bus services or internet to help fuel her creative ideas. So through her own pure love of drawing, she became the second member of her family to go to university after her eldest sister, and would go on to study design, work as a designer at John Lewis and do other graphic design related jobs up until she ended up at the BBC working as a senior designer. Here, she has created weather forecast backgrounds, explainers for different weather related phenomena and animations to be used during the broadcasts, which you have probably seen! Her son Tom Hylton was an old boy at the RGS who went on to work with Jaguar as a car designer after internships in Germany and Austria. They both kindly allowed me to ask them a few questions explaining their jobs and how they managed to start working in them. Tricia and her journey into the world of graphic design! I wasn't very academic at school, so art was my favourite subject and I wanted to do a foundation art course because it covered a whole range of disciplines, so I could just sort of experiment. But, it also meant that I didn't have to do A levels because you only needed five GCSEs or CSCs in those days to do that, and you could go in at 17: that suited me, so that's what I did. I went to Oxford Brookes and did a foundation art course, and then from that year of doing all different disciplines, I found graphic design because I knew that I wanted to do something where I could earn a living. A lot of people were doing the Fine Arts and different disciplines, but I couldn't really see how you could get a job doing that, which heavily influenced my choice of graphics. I got in at Middlesex Polytechnic (university), and a lot of this time was me drifting through because certain things that I knew I wanted for myself, like the fact that I didn't want to go to university and do three years of a subject and not have anything at the end of it. I mean that's how I saw it at the time, but I know there's more to it. At the time, there were obviously no digital tools so drawing, lettering, everything was all done by hand, the whole lot. Even photography meant doing your own developing of your work. It was only near my third year when people started talking about the BBC, and I did go and see them. I finished my degree and I got a job at John Lewis in their design Department, which I didn't like because it was the typical nine to five, and it just didn't suit me at all. So within about nine months, I had put an application into the BBC and got offered a job there. Going into television at that point in time, I wasn't even fully aware of everything that was involved in it. I used to think even the adverts the were part of the show, which obviously they weren ’ t, and so for the most part, I ended up learning while television was developing. Around the European election was the time I went into the news and current affairs side of things. I worked on Nationwide and then I moved across to helping set up news night when it first started and the money program as well as other areas. Then when breakfast time first started, it was the first time that digital things were used on television. We had something called a Quantel Paintbox (a dedicated computer graphics workstation for composition of broadcast television video and graphics) so for a while, on the BBC everything was done on film. All your animations were done on film and had to be taken into Soho, filmed, developed, edited, and then put on telly because that's how broadcasting worked. Careers in the Creative Industry - A Chat with Tom and Trica Hylton