When I was a kid in Melbourne in the early seventies, I visited the Jigsaw Factory in Bridge Road, Richmond, most Saturday mornings. The factory was started by Bruce Weatherhead and Alex Stitt’s graphic design firm Weatherhead & Stitt. They designed forty-five different toys and games—those included the Pirate Game, which my brother and I loved, and Spellbound and Tableland, which we didn’t love so much. James Button, a journalist of my generation and Jigsaw Factory aficionado, once wrote: ‘Jigsaw had two doors: a normal one, and a tiny one for children. Inside, people who were small enough could crawl through wooden houses, giant snakes or a sunken toy pit, full of toys, bean bags and orange and purple cubes. Upstairs, Nancy Cato from the ABC’s Adventure Island program ran theatre workshops, and Bruce Woodley from The Seekers would come in to sing on Sunday afternoons.’ (James Button, ‘Graphic designers who challenged the norm’, Age, 10 November 2002)

The visual styles developed by key Australian graphic designers create the visual landscape we grow up in: the images we see in the newspapers, on television, on stamps, in billboard posters, in books and in advertising campaigns—yet the work, and the men and women behind it, are rarely discussed.  You may not have heard of Alex Stitt but you will know his work, if not from the film posters and titles he designed in the seventies, then from the advertising campaigns he designed—such as ‘Life. Be in it’ and ‘Slip, Slop, Slap’. His career, as this interview shows, has been one of extraordinary length and breadth.