Julie Pople is the mum in the mother-daughter duo that heads up Ink Dish’s design team. With college graduations popping up this time of year, she was asked to put together a bio and top ten list about being a designer.

Julie with some of her designs in a Kuala Lumpur department store

Julie graduated from Liverpool Art College (now John Moores University) in 1971 with a degree in Textile Design. After working in a textile design studio in Bolton , she left to train as an art teacher. She turned to ceramic design in the early 1980s working initially in the UK Potteries, then later concentrating on the Limoges porcelain industry. After a stint as an in-house designer for Royal Stafford, she became head of design for the European arm of PT Sango, one of the world’s largest tableware manufacturers. In 2003 she established her own business Julie Pople Designs www.juliepopledesigns.com  which has enjoyed considerable success in markets throughout the world. In 2008 she partnered with Ink Dish www.inkdish.com a business focusing on the manufacture and sale of fine art tableware

Top Ten Tips on being a Designer

1.    Be true to your design ideals but be sensitive to the commercial concerns of your customers
2.    Self-doubt goes with the territory, but don’t underestimate your value
3.    Keep up to date with the latest design software, in my case that’s Adobe Photoshop
4.    Communicate – keep as many channels open as possible. My latest is an ftp site
5.    Travel! British designers are highly regarded abroad
6.    Keep your portfolio of designs fresh – don’t be afraid to ‘retire’ designs
7.    Look for inspiration when you travel. Visit galleries, boutiques, and study the ever changing world of the consumer
8.    Keep in touch with fellow designers. A network of support is vital in what is often a lonely job
9.    Don’t wait for inspiration to strike – establish a regular work routine
10.   Keep going till everyone else drops out!

It is fantastic to get written about by people in the industry. International Tableware and Nouveau by Homeworld Business News are well respected industry publications that have supported us from the beginning. We appreciate all the ink and the chance to have our small company side by side with the giants in the industry.

Our latest spread in Nouveau features the release of Alyson Fox’s line.

In International Tableware Caroline is interviewed on her views on the US market. Growing up in the UK and still splitting time, Caroline gets a unique inside view of both markets and how the trends move back and fourth.

“Style wise design in the UL seems to use cooler oculars and less cover, while in the US there are far more hand painted themes – lots of rousers, etc. However, the US has within it many markets so there are strong regional variations in colour palette and style, which makes generalizations difficult.” Read the whole article here:

“One year ago, the challenge dinnerware start-up Ink Dish set for itself was to produce designer dinnerware for less than $100 per place setting. The company’s target market is young urban professionals, or people buying their first home, who want to invest in edgy, fashion-focused dinnerware that is priced affordably.

Caroline Pople, Ink Dish’s design director, grew up with the gentle traditions of English tableware. Her mother, Julie Pople, has been in the industry for nearly 30 years designing for the top names in Staffordshire and Limoges. After earning a degree in silversmithing and allied crafts at the London Metropolitan University, Pople teamed up with her mother. Together, they worked for Royal Doulton, Lenox, Villeroy and Boch, and Oneida, to name a few.” Read the full article in Ceramic Industry Magazine

Ink Dish was born from a project developed at the Cass Business School in London. I chose Cass because, although the MBA program is top ten in U.K. and ticks all the boxes for accounting and economics, it also encourages creativity which can often easily be overlooked amongst all those spreadsheets.

Recently, I was interviewed for the alumni news publication.

What is your most treasured memory of your time at Cass?
The trips to China and Poland were fantastic, but if I had to pick one memory it would be the sinking ship exercise in Portsmouth (photo above). We were all still getting to know each other and were thrown into a situation that was so foreign to many of us: a naval training exercise where you’re waist deep in water hammering shims into leaks in the hull of a massive iron boat.

Read the full interview on the Cass Business School Website:

I’ve been asked a few times now how we put Paul’s artwork onto the plates so I thought I’d share it with everyone.

As anyone who’s been Inked can tell you, the tattoo starts it’s life as a drawing by the tattoo artist, it’s just an outline really. The artist draws onto a transferable paper and it becomes a stencil that goes onto your skin in the desired area. The magic begins when the artist puts needle to skin and blends colours and shades all free hand directly onto your flesh.

Tattooing plates was obviously a bit different. We were given the artwork as a basic stencil, and as beautiful and intricate as Paul’s drawings are we had to digitally add the colours and shading with photoshop. Paul’s drawing came with instructions on the various techniques and styles of shading and the colurs typically used in tattooing.  Once we had perfected that with the tattooists approval, the digital images were ready to send onto the factory for production and then that’s a whole other story for another time.