Creative profile: Aled Haywood
The joys of making by hand: in conversation with artist, illustrator and designer, Aled Haywood.
If you’ve spent much time on the Connecting Threads website, the chances are you’ll have noticed a procession of cheerfully illustrated folks busying themselves with a range of activities – photographing frogs and butterflies, listening in to the sounds of flowers, plucking herbs, taking a walk or grappling with an OS map. These illustrations are the work of artist and designer Aled Haywood, a long-time friend and collaborator of Connecting Threads.
Aled took a slightly roundabout route into illustration and graphic design, having trained in fine art at Edinburgh College of Art. Across various creative fields, his practice shows a fascination with visual cultures, especially the processes of repetition that underpin design identities, creating scope for moments of clarity and slippage, communication and miscommunication.
Previous projects include Badges for Palestine (2023), sets of handmade pin badges sold through Instagram to raise funds for Medical Aid for Palestine (MAP); speculative drawing project Green Man Green Man (2020-ongoing); and Tooth Time (2018), a zine informed by the graphic design found in dentists’ waiting rooms, and exhibited as part of The Publishing Studio in The House That Heals the Soul at The Tetley, Leeds.
To find out more about his uniquely idiosyncratic approach, we caught up with Aled during a summer break from creative work (during which he and Mary got married!).
Aled Haywood, Tooth Time (2018)
Your way into design has been slightly unusual in that you studied painting (at Edinburgh College of Art) rather than graphic design or illustration. How did you move from that particular part of the art world into design?
You’re right – I have no formal training in design. It has been a very organic development – I’ve always done bits and bobs and now I do more bits and bobs than I used to!
My first work was in the local music scene in York, doing posters for friends’ bands. Then while at ECA, I carried on doing posters for touring bands performing at The Duchess, a music venue in York – now sadly closed – but I would barely call it ‘design’. At the same time, I started doing some branding work for a vintage shop, and gradually this design work crept into my art practice. For example, for my degree show, I created a motif – a smug face of satisfied consumer. I arrived at the image through a process of drawing and redrawing, honing towards a fixed logo-like image. I was interested in distilling an idea into a clear, replicable image that doesn’t change.
Aled Haywood, collage pieces
How do you balance your design/illustration work with your fine art practice. Are they closely related or quite separate in your mind?
At the moment, my work involves more illustration than graphic design. I had my design work and I had my studio work and I kept them separate for a time, but now they’re more merged. It all feels quite soupy – the boundaries are less defined now. My art process has become very ambient, less towards making work for exhibitions.
I have a few strands on the go now. Me and Mary spend a lot of time in charity shops, markets and thrift shops, and this has started to become a kind of research activity as I’m endlessly photographing objects with interesting or weird design elements or packaging. I’m amassing quite an archive of this stuff which I often refer back to when looking for ideas - it’s a way of collecting without collecting the physical objects (although anyone who has visited our flat will see that we do a fair bit of this too!)
Another is a series of sketchbook drawings which develop over long periods. I’m interested in that tension between the instantaneous nature of the sketch and the way it can be developed over weeks and months. The sketches are ambient in nature as they’re effectively free drawings that accumulate without really much thought and serve as a kind of functional document – tracking ideas, doodles, phrases – and also images in their own right. But both of these are still developing.
This process of honing something over and over through drawing is something that runs across nearly all my work. I’ve always liked work that seems to have a light touch or a sense of slightness, but which has developed through a considered and highly worked process. The actual drawing might take a minute but there are a lot of previous incarnations in order to get to that point.
So if I’m working with collage, I’m using roughly cut shapes but there will have been a lot of prior thought involved to get to that point. Similarly, on the Connecting Threads website, what you see is just line drawings, but the actual forms and figures have been heavily stylised through a process.
There seems to be a determinedly analogue and lo-fi approach behind much of your work. Would that be fair?
I don’t think I’ve ever done anything straight onto a computer. I’m interested in the idea that digital tools which we as creatives use are themselves designed, so by relying on those tools you can end up in the same places as everyone else. I’m always looking to find weird ways around that.
Do you think that’s related to your training in art rather than design?
Maybe. The whole point of design is often about the perfect final image, but the thing I find enjoyable is the getting there. I’m definitely interested in process – how you arrive at an endpoint. It makes me wonder: is my work actually the designing rather than the design?
There is so much discussion around AI at the moment, and it is an interesting dilemma for creative people. What is a way of working that AI wouldn’t think to do? For example, using coloured pencils or cutting out paper. I think these analogue methods preserve something that can’t be touched by the world of AI. It’s a way of working but it’s also a tool for generating possibilities. Even if you don’t have any ideas, you can grab some coloured paper and some scissors and something will happen.
What it also means is that my work has gone down this slightly skewed path where things might be a little bit off-kilter. I’ve recently got more into typography, especially early 20th-century, hand-drawn typefaces. Things are wonky and I feel that brings in a human element. Sometimes it feels like we live in a world of soulless vectors, where things are super clean and endlessly enlargeable, so it’s nice to retain some of that wonkiness.
Aled Haywood, WaterOrgan collaging process
Aled Haywood for settle / Oisín Gallagher
Is there a particular project that encompasses some of this approach?
One example is the logo form I produced for Oisín Gallagher, an artist and furniture maker whose brand is called Settle, which is a type of Irish vernacular chair that could be folded into another form such as a table or bed. I’d been on the train from Galashiels and noticed the numbers on the platform sign at Edinburgh, all made up of interesting triangles. I started to think about those diagonal lines as folding edges.
The resulting logo is quite hard-edged but the way I got there was through cut-up bits of paper. It’s an intuitive and fundamental way of making: there is something in that process, working with your hands and moving things around, that you can’t do on a tablet or with a mouse. At some stage, I have to scan the work into a computer but I try not to clean it up too much, so some of the shapes are not perfectly square. The furniture itself is clean, straight and sharp, but in really lush woods. I hope the logo gives that idea – slightly industrial but with that human element, because all the pieces are hand-made by one person.
I also made a little film of the letters falling and settling. It’s hilariously lo-fi.
You’ve produced design work and illustration for multiple Connecting Threads projects, including WaterOrgan, Flux Alluvia, Meander and more, helping to shape what is hopefully a distinctive visual identity along the way. How has that sustained relationship informed the work you make?
I’m based in Glasgow and didn’t know the Tweed and surrounding places that well. When I first started working for Connecting Threads, the team made a source-to-sea tour of the Tweed, and that was really important to help me start to understand the area. These are places with so much going on and people so invested in culture and community. It’s important to feel like you’re not imposing too much from the outside.
One thing that struck me was how all the community noticeboards seem to be chock full of posters that people make themselves for an event or sale or whatever it might be that’s going on. There is always a lot going on! The visual language of those posters is different to what I might produce, and that is at the front of my mind whenever I’m doing anything for Connecting Threads. I want whatever I design to fit in on those noticeboards – to have something of that community feel rather than being overly design-led or intellectual.
Aled Haywood, design for Mark Zygadlo's WaterOrgan (2023)
Within that overall approach, each project has quite a different feel, would you say?
Yes. I try to approach each project or event as something with its own branding and identity. It’s about trying not to impose too much of a style and letting each project lead itself, but it also keeps things exciting for me as a designer.
With Mark Zygadlo’s WaterOrgan, for example, I wanted to try doing an animation in coloured paper. The Tweed offers a specific audience for a designer, so I try to be conscious of that. I could have gone down a completely different route about process and translation from nature to music, which might have suited a more contemporary art context. But I was conscious of keeping things friendly, light, and hopefully open to everyone.
WaterOrgan is quite a complex project – part-organ, part-catamaran, with all these sensors, making music from the river. It’s quite hard to describe it to people, so instead of getting too much into the details I wanted to create something punchy to get across a sense of excitement. I did worry my design ended up like a 1970s children’s book illustration! There was a danger of over-simplifying Mark’s project but I think he liked it and I hope it caught people’s imagination too.
Aled Haywood, salmon procession illustration for Connecting Threads
Can you talk about the illustrations you produced for the Connecting Threads website?
Connecting Threads gave me free reign to produce what I felt would be most suitable. For the website illustrations, I was thinking back to some of the amazing projects Connecting Threads have been involved with – like Film Our Gardens or the salmon procession in Horncliffe. People make these beautiful paper salmon lanterns, parade through the village in sequined outfits, and then burn all the lanterns at the end.
I also wanted to build on the visuals I had already produced for Kirsty Law’s Meander project, which involved lots of people in black and white. As soon as you see people, it gives a sense of life and things happening, and that felt important. I just did loads of drawings, and then gradually refined them. I didn’t want to make anything too intrusive – the illustrations have to live on the website for a long time.
For more information and insight, follow Aled Haywood on Instagram.