Exeter's unassuming co-op worker leads double life as 'Lord of the Logos'

https://www.devonlive.com/whats-on/whats-on-news/exeters-unassuming-co-op-worker-10039941

by summoned • 1 year ago

194 72 1 year ago

devonlive.com

flippant• 1 year ago

Archived copy

https://archive.is/JbtH8

m463• 1 year ago

so exeter co-op is a grocery store?

AndrewDucker• 1 year 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.

mattl5• 1 year 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.

FearNotDaniel• 1 year 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

kristianp• 1 year ago

Pronounced "coo-op" or "cwop", depending on your accent.

treetalker• 1 year ago

Logos as in corporate designs, not Greek / Christian logos.

brendoelfrendo• 1 year 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_T• 1 year ago

Yeah I totally thought this was going to be about some new religious or spiritual movement.

IshKebab• 1 year ago

Heavy metal logos, not corporate logos.

arpinum• 1 year ago

I'll pop in tomorrow and see if he does corporate logos

columb• 1 year 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)

mattl5• 1 year ago

Wasn’t expecting to see Exeter on the homepage for sure.

dotBen2• 1 year 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.

xanderlewis• 1 year ago

Wasn't expecting to see the Co-op.

shermantanktop• 1 year 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.

starkparker• 1 year 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

darkwater• 1 year ago

This style is mainly used by black metal and death metal bands, not every heavy metal one.

Doxin• 1 year ago

Most, but not all[0]

[0] https://www.dravenstales.ch/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/party...

jccalhoun• 1 year ago

People seem to like the style but I find them virtually unreadable.

jlarocco• 1 year ago

Same here. I think they look kinda neat, but I can't read them to save my life.

senderista• 1 year 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.

kilpikaarna• 1 year 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_NL• 1 year 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."

anticorporate2• 1 year 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.

nobodyandproud• 1 year 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.

0xbadcafebee• 1 year 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.

y423• 1 year 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.

wffurr• 1 year 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.

Liquix• 1 year 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

switch007• 1 year ago

It's an ad blocker testing site that occasionally has some news

PaulRobinson2• 1 year 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.

dcsan3• 1 year 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

GardenLetter272• 1 year ago

Why aren't you using Firefox with uBlock Origin?

y423• 1 year ago

I am... experienced that on my mobile.

(and fwiwf, shameless self promotion, thats why I wrote my own AI based summarizing service: https://nickyreinert.de/blog/2025/02/16/poneyhot-eats-click-...

dcsan3• 1 year ago

Reader mode in mobile? But then maybe you lose some graphics

sieste• 1 year 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!"

lukecarr• 1 year ago

A DevonLive article on HN: this must be one of the four horsemen!

dmje• 1 year ago

Ah, town of my teen years, hidden under 300 pop ups and adspam

ninalanyon2• 1 year ago

Firefox + uBlock cures that.

fitsumbelay• 1 year ago

very cool story

croisillon2• 1 year ago

What a horrible ad and spam drenched website, poor Devonians :(

tonyedgecombe2• 1 year 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.

ninalanyon2• 1 year ago

Firefox + uBlock cures that.

croisillon2• 1 year ago

that's correct but i opened it on my iphone (safari)

Exeter's unassuming co-op worker leads double life as 'Lord of the Logos'

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