In this post;

• What I have learned about typesetting

• Managing time and focus

• Regaining my brain after too long at a screen

I finished typesetting the first chapter of the second edition of Vinciness and then had to go for a run.

This was not a noble act of discipline. It was not part of a carefully managed hustle-bro morning routine. It was more like getting up from the desk and realising my head had turned into a tray of loose screws.

The chapter had moved from manuscript into the paperback layout. The margins were set. The page numbers were working. The chapter title had found its place. A few bad line breaks had been fixed.

Typesetting is a mountain of incredible tedium. Draining like like an unending tax return. Unable to be sated like a mosquito bite that feels so damned good to scratch. Each action and decision has a significance.

Typesetting can make you feel ridiculous because the work looks so minor from the outside. When I agreed to take Vinciness on, Jon Hotten had sold it to me as ‘a bit of light typesetting’.

This was a challenge that I was keen to take on but hadn’t fully appreciated; the tax is real, mentally and physically.

You are not bowling twenty overs into the wind. You are not doing hill sprints with a coach yelling at you. You are sitting in front of InDesign, adjusting small things that almost nobody will ever consciously notice.

It reminds me of the kind of tiredness that comes after cricket. You’ve only stood at slip, bent down, offered solid advice to those far more talented than you for a number of hours - but you’re stuffed.

Thanks for having a read. This is all about Vinciness, a book by Jon Hotten that I’ve provided creative and design work to. Check out the first edition here.

Vinciness; First Edition

The other thing you are not doing, is writing. The stakes of getting out of the way so the writers craft can do its best work are high. In this case they are multiplied by my passion for the text.

Typesetting is not about finding the big idea. It is about staying with the small decisions long enough for the object to improve.

A line runs badly; you fix it. Then the next page shifts. You move that too. Then you look again, move it back, and wonder whether the first version was better. The work becomes a cycle of effort, correction and review.

I hate it and love it all at the same time. Of all the areas of specialisation in graphic design I’d love to have been a specialist in, type setting would be it. The mind-bending quagmire of science, maths and visual language hovers over a designer while they shoehorn a writers story through the reduced tracking of serif and extenders.

You are never truly satisfied with results, but you are truly pleased. Like running an unending marathon, you can at least admire your splits.

The real challenge is that the mountain of small decisions can infect you with maddening tedium. It can be like accidentally listening to talk-back on SEN; you can begin to get hung up on the infinitesimal and lose sight of the bigger picture.

In sport, the cycle is train, recover, repeat. The body can’t be expected to keep improving without rest. You learn when to push and when to stop before the work turns to rubbish.

After a couple of hours on the first chapter, having a run was essential; good vibe chemicals produced by the body, fresh air and looking at the horizon. The clarity afterwards was genuinely remarkable. I mentioned it to (at best) half-interested wife.

‘That’s nice dear’

It prompted me to map out the coming week of typesetting with some targets to hit and with exercise built into each session.

Vinciness is one of the main projects for the studio at the moment. It’s become a literal and figurative sprint of work; laying out the time available, actioning work and building in time to step away.

The mantra of this project has become: Work, step away, return, improve.

Hope you’ll join in for the result. More artwork implementation coming next week.

You can pre-order a copy of the paperback edition of Vinciness here in Australia and here in the UK.

In this post;

• Turning BBL medals into a keepsake

• Studio process for creating a unique commemoration

• A visit to Sunshine Heights CC to bring an artwork to life

Some sporting stories don’t move in a straight line.

Peter Hatzoglou’s certainly didn’t. He was playing in a grade cricket practice match that happened to include a few Big Bash League players. From there, he was invited to train with the Melbourne Stars. Then he was picked up to play. Over time, that unlikely beginning became a proper T20 career: three Big Bash League titles, across two clubs, from a starting point at Sunshine Heights Cricket Club.

When Peter came to Fisher Classics, the brief was simple on the surface. He had medals that deserved to be presented properly. But framing the medals on their own felt a little too narrow for the story.

The achievement mattered, of course. But the path mattered too.

Thanks for having a read. If you’d like to subscribe to our studios emails you can do so on our site.

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The plan

I kept coming back to the idea of a backgammon board. Partly because of its connection to Greek social clubs, family tables and cafe culture. Partly because it gave the piece a practical quality that felt right for Peter. It could be opened and displayed, hung on a wall, laid flat on a table, or closed and put away.

This meant a couple of trips to Oakleigh to find the right board in thrift shops.

That flexibility became a useful part of the idea. The piece didn’t have to behave like a standard framed object. It could sit somewhere between artwork, case and family keepsake.

The medals were set into black felt in the lower half of the board, protected and held in place. Above them, an inset artwork told the wider story: the club, the career, the family history, and the unusual leap from suburban practice match to professional cricket.

To build that artwork, I visited Sunshine Heights, Peter’s original club.

Site visits change work. They just do.

You notice the ground, the surfaces, the doors, the colours, the textures. Small things that help place the story somewhere real.

Those details made their way into the artwork. The work needed to feel connected to where Peter’s cricket had come from, not only where it ended up.

The shot

The artwork also drew on Peter’s Greek and Macedonian heritage, with a nod to the idea of The Odyssey. That reference felt natural because his career had a bit of that quality to it: a journey away from home, a strange turn, a run of unlikely events, and something brought back at the end.

In this case, what came back were medals. But also a story worth keeping.

The finished piece works because it does not treat the medals as the whole story. They are the proof, but not the entire meaning. Around them sits club cricket, family history, heritage, ambition, timing, and the oddness of a sporting career that could easily have gone another way.

That is often where commemorative work becomes interesting. Not in making the achievement look bigger than it is, but in finding the right setting for it.

A signed shirt can be valuable, but some careers ask for a different form. They need an object that reflects the person as much as the result.

For Peter, the backgammon board did that. It carried the medals without turning them into a display cabinet. It gave the story shape, while still allowing the piece to feel personal and private. It could live in a room, be opened with family, or be stored away.

The result

Sport gives us plenty of obvious symbols: medals, shirts, scorecards, headlines. But the meaning often sits in quieter places. The first club. The family background. The practice match that led somewhere unexpected.

Peter’s piece became a way of holding those parts together.

It is a backgammon board, an artwork, and a small record of a career that began in one place and somehow found its way to another.

Video - See the full story

In this post;

• Creating a unique book about cricket and life

• The challenges of making an art book and a cricket at the same time

• The project outcome and photos

This project was a real joy for the studio to undertake. A fantastic challenge from a wonderful client and a brilliant bit of writing. Hope you enjoy.

The set up

I was contacted by the English writer, Jon Hotten to help with visual presentation of a book he’d written called ‘Vinciness’.

Jon Hotten is a journalist and author whose career spans music, football and cricket journalism. His work has appeared in national newspapers, cricket outlets and magazines, and he has also worked as an editor and podcaster.

Jon was looking for a short publication run (102 copies) and wanted the book to look and feel like a beautiful artefact.

He’d found me through my own views on cricket book covers published in Cricket Et Al. I’d panned cricket book covers in general and published my own top ten covers of all time.

Jon was now paying me to make a cricket book and its cover; time to put my money where my mouth went.

The plan

Through our initial discoveries, Jon and I agreed that this book should be a unique experience for the reader. At 90 pages, it was a small novella of vignettes about cricket, art and life. The project presented opportunities for some bespoke creativity.

Jon’s writing was a collection of stories that captured the beauty of crickets action and tragedy of its many near misses, captured in its title - Vinciness or the Unbearable Sadness of Batting

Its central figure rides high and low across their career and their form and story is compared to many varied sports and cultural figures. James Vince, a beautiful cricketer, and his journeyman career were the through line.

Thanks for having a read. It’s great to have you here. If you’d like to subscribe to our studios emails you can do so on our site.

Subscribe to Fisher Classics Studio

The short run, the unique characters, the varied scenes of the book lent itself to the use of collage, paint texture and ink splotches. Chapter artworks were created to announce Jons writing and punctuate the adventure. We used a club colour of one of Vince’s teams to unify the books cover, endpapers and chapter artwork.

Through consultation, it was decided typesetting should work to give both a literary and artistic feel. The challenge was to create an art book as well as a short novel in the same hardcover book.

The shot

We engaged Mike and his team at Ex Why Zed printing house who assisted us with some stock selection and design decisions. Once we had the shape of the book it was down to typesetting, image composition and production.

Typesetting a book may be the most deeply satisfying yet maddening thing a creative can do. You can feel it’s all there and right to go until you notice one mistake and everything needs changing.

It’s truly akin to the highs and lows of cricket.

Setting a book as its illustrator offers a unique perspective. By the time I got around to composing the images, the story and Jons evocative writing has seeped into my own perspective. From a creative aspect I’d been working with the words of the text for some time and the images almost created themselves.

The result

The outcome was 99 printed pages with cover artwork, end papers, typesetting and chapter artwork created by Fisher Classics Studio.

102 numbered copies for sale through Jons fantastic substack, Arrangements of White on Green.

You can buy Vinciness or The Unbearable Sadness of Batting here.

In this post;

• How to publish your work as calmly and rewardingly as possible

• Doing doing really fiddly work after a great deal of work

• Upcoming stuff from the studio

So it’s been a minute. Best intentions were to make this a regular thing and get posting in a way that feels manageable and regular.

But life happens, right?

A hugely productive and strange period

Lots of things in the planet right now feel like they are at a juncture. Big things are happening.

The studio itself has gone through an incredibly productive and creative period. There’s been a couple of big commissions and regular illustrations and articles for Cricket Et Al.

Getting pleasing results like this is awesome to stoke the creative fires and get the inspo flowing. Genuinely feels like what footballers call ‘running on top of the grass’. Weirdly, though, success in the creative game can create its own challenges.

The simple matter being that Fisher Classics has made a bunch of great stuff that its proud of but I can’t actually be sure if anybody has seen it. A lot of it sits in hard drives in the studio or on servers in the cloud.

The digital publicity monster needs feeding and all I’ve got is some poorly named and ordered .psd files.

After creating three large and unique projects I’m faced with the task of collating them into a way that helps others understand what sort of work the studio does.

I’m keen to share all this work, and to do it in a way that doesn’t feed Zuckerbergs greedy algorithm.

It’s as brutal and undignified as trade period happening days after the warm glow of a Grand Final. But its important to get the house in order to have another go.

A short sprint after a marathon

So, what happens next? What do we do here? Why am I actually doing this?

Following back to back projects the overwhelm is real;

Image sizes, INDD files, colour correction, DNS server and C-Names as well as lost logins…. GAH!

The key thing I’ve discovered from managing the studio is that my own thoughts need ordering. Creatively the synapses can start firing off but it can create its own thought storm that fires of strikes of randomised distraction.

‘I’m going to make a great an clever series about ‘x’
‘…and its going to have this type very clever feature’
‘everyone will think its really clever if I also include this’

That’s right; along with the overwhelm is a nasty and noisy perfectionist streak that can seriously get in the way.

How to cut through the noise

My thoughts need sorting. Journaling is key.

Shouldn’t need to advertise the benefits of the practice of writing things down but some of the best are Cam aka Struthless. His book Your Head is a Houseboat is a brilliant exploration of journaling practice and one that I can only recommend fully to those with a busy brain.

When I get my thoughts out onto a page it empowers the good and diminishes the useless.

There is something wild about looking at a thought that occupied your mind physically in front of you and seeing its power evaporate.

Conversely, it’s amazing to feel creativity flow once the hand starts moving on the page. The thought distillation process seemingly automated once you get going.

Studio Site

So after an overwhelming amount of fiddly work my portfolio site is finally ready for debut.

Well… not just yet I’ve got a bunch more things to add and it contains some stuff that’s not yet launched.

Should be ready in the next little while and looking forward to sharing here.

‘til then - Go Well.

Dan

Fisher Classics is a creative studio that treats sport as culture.
You don’t need to subscribe, but you’re welcome to follow along here.
And if you feel like a squiz, the work lives on the site.

In this post;

• Reasons not to follow a Graphic Artist on Substack

• Pictures of Cricket and Footy Prints

• Why sport art and marketing it can suck

• Lashings of self-deprication

Like a lot of creative types, I work a job and make stuff when I can. It’s usually posters and artworks about sports and the odd deep dive into art direction. It’s all great fun so I write about it.

[If you need an explainer of what sort of stuff I do you can take a look at this short post]

I am not “building an amazing community” or selling exclusive access. You won’t miss out on paywalled posts or the chance for a video call. But I do need to let people know I exist so I can keep my business alive; hence this Susbstack.

In this economy there’s a pressure to be constantly hustling; dancing on Instagram, having a TikTok account in your 40s and generally plugging what you do like Don King on Pension Day. It’s a total drag.

You probably hate getting sold to as much as creatives hate selling. Here’s why you should forego subscribing to this publication.

1. Everyone is asking you to subscribe to something already

Seriously, the subscription model thing has everyone down. Tesla are offering driverless parking as an ongoing subscription rather than something you pay for once. Removing Amazon Prime takes a degree in Computer Science.

Personal information is mined out of all of us at an alarming rate for incredibly little benefit.

There’s data breaches constantly and the information you handed over ends up for sale on the dark web.

If you can’t trust banks and healthcare funds to protect your data, a collage artist from Brunswick is a true leap of faith.

We all need a new subscription in the same way we need another Star Wars film.

Still here?

Here’s what you will get from Field Notes;

• Semi-regular articles about sport as culture

• Occasional studio notes about a commission or project

• Deep dives on art direction in sports

  ---

2. My viewpoint does not matter

Let’s face it; if you follow Australian sports like any Australian, you’ll have probably used the prefix ‘Look, what they should do…’ before offering a solution to the ruck injury problem, The A-League and every selection of every Aussie Cricket side.

My opinion won’t sway yours. Your mind is most likely made up and you are probably looking for confirmation bias. You’ll probably get cranky with my explorations of a game’s cultural significance and have a go at me in the comments section (which I don’t have).

My content is cultural critiques on colour schemes for heritage round uniforms and essays on obscure and weird cricket trophies.

You could tune in for this or you could instead, settle in for a well-earned nap or guilt-free doomscroll.

3. I am not really a writer

I do some work for two blokes who are the best in the business and get to bask in some of their reflected glory, but I’m years behind them in terms of sports writing experience.

I have absolutely no professional credibility when it comes to sports writing, no mega platform to make this go mega viral and am selling no products of real utility.

This Substack won’t tell you who’s going to win and why or fill you with confidence in constructing a multi.

You’ll be indulging the creative ramblings of a niche creative working to shoehorn his way to relevance. All this in an industry whose contributions to style and culture include doing a shoey, grown men wearing footy jumpers over shirts and asking if a team of professionals has in fact ‘come to play’.

4. It’s Substack

Substacks are like arseholes; everyone has one (now) and nobody seems to think that theirs stinks.

I’ve got a real zeal for exploring my passions but this will not change the world. This Substack is not essential reading and I have no intention to charge for it, ever.

Sure, the fact that these are ‘newsletters’ gives the whole thing an air of gravitas and culture, but the barrier to entry is so low that anyone can start one.

Reading beyond the second paragraph of any articles posted here should confirm this.

Also the grift on this platform is real and sly, non-paying stacks will deliver great how to content laden with sign up offers as a kicker at the end.

The Linkedinish pump-up posts and self-congratulations at skyrocketing subscriber counts truly is the sound of one hand clapping.

5. Either way, you’ll lose

So, if you’ve decided to ignore the warnings I’ve listed, and you’ve decided to push on you could be in for disappointment.

Creatives that publish content like this can often take a downward turn after a strong start. The paradox being that the thing you get a following for makes you too busy to do that thing.

If this clickbaity content marketing actually works, then my studio will become busy (I hope).

A busy studio means less carefully prepared and considered sports as culture arty musings and more ‘got this in stock. Don’t miss out’ emails.

We’ve all seen influencers that blow up and get a team of producers to help them only to lose their mojo.

This is your chance to save your inbox from this flagrant content marketing.

6. Nobody really cares

I’ve been marketing and selling this studio since the pandemic and I’ve realised this stone-cold fact.

You can find all sorts of hustle-bro, rise-and-grind type discussion around this notion; most people don’t spend any time thinking about you and your business.

It’s the most freeing thing that you can know as a solo operator because it allows you to have a crack.

People are caring, absolutely, but this Substack will not change your life.

You can save your attention for important things like income tax or booking a trip to the dentist.

7. A lot of sports art is pretty bad

On this substack Football Record covers will take a beatdown and I’ll go deep on Grand Final Entertainment.

Sport can talk to us about the game of life in such immediate and complex ways. The way that we commemorate it deserves attention and refinement.

There’s genuinely creative and fascinating people within sports and their stories are often poorly told. A bit of care will bring their stories to life.

Writing here is the most fulfilling way that I can talk about my studio and passions without feeling like a Wildlife Society Koala at Palmer United Party meeting.

I might be patting myself on the back for a signature work on the cultural significance of the 84 Winter Games posters.

But you can still breeze right past the subscribe button and get on with your day.

If this is your introduction to Fisher Classics: it’s a creative studio that treats sport as culture.
You don’t need to subscribe, but you’re welcome to follow along here.
And if you feel like a squiz, the work lives on the site.
Emails always open.

Field Notes is the journal of
Fisher Classics, a creative studio that treats sport as culture

Here’s what you will get from Field Notes;

• Semi-regular articles about sport as culture

• Occasional studio notes about a commission or project

• Deep dives on art direction in sports

Hello.

My name is Dan. I am a digital artist and illustrator from Melbourne, Australia. I started the Fisher Classics project in 2020 during lockdowns to brush up on some professional skills.

I began making artworks about sports.

In the years since, I’ve sold works in The Cricketer Magazine featured in The Australian and created branding identities and digital illustrations for Cricket Et Al.

My works have featured at The Chappel Foundation Dinner. I’ve filled commissions for international athletes and sports clubs from community to national level.

Check out Fisher Classics Artworks

It’s been fun, but not easy.

Becoming a solo-praneur is something that I both love and hate. Balancing being a hustle-bro while still making stuff I am proud of is tough. If I’m going to build an audience, I want to enjoy doing it and make stuff I am proud of.

So I started Field Notes.

These essays are a chance for me to explore the things I really love; sports, design, culture and creativity. It’s not your usual sports content or your usual art content.

I hope you’ll enjoy Field Notes.

Subscribe now

Trying to get better at anything is hard, but deciding how to get better is another thing altogether. This is something that athletes do professionally, publicly and under intense scrutiny.

This trope of the sport/life relationship can be meaninglessly parroted out in my local sporting environs. Local coaches roll out hackneyed clichés and punditry squeezes notions together to create bizarre non-speak.

Seasons of Australian Rules football puke up their own version of AI slop; terms that are put together to quickly and poorly describe the incredibly detailed, deliberate and complex plans of team tactics and player development.

However, there’s plenty to be learned from our jocular comrades – constant revision and reflection, planning and iteration. Serena Williams obsessive review of her service motion captures this.

While athletes can have their training schedule and diet mapped out by a team of high-performance professionals, us creatives (or otherwise) are not so orderly/well resourced. We vibe on bits of tutorials, maybe do part of a course for some technical stuff, go see a film, stumble across things that inform our practise. Some of us even do a degree.

In extremis, the starving artist and meathead jock tropes are at polar ends of the spectrum in terms of approach. However, the lessons of sport can assist us beyond the aspirational.

Yes, perseverance is required, yes you’ve got to be brave in sport and life. Yes, you can get somewhere if you try; ok sports media with emotional soundtrack and slow-mo footage, we get that.

There are strategies that coaches and athletes deploy in training that are universal problem solving (hello cliché) exercises. In the same way soldiers are sent out on manoeuvres or students are set equations.

Claude Monet skilled up on capturing light by painting haystacks at sunset and sunrise. He kept a number of canvases to work on in any given day depending on the lighting conditions on the same subject. He worked these multiple canvases to explore the techniques to capture light.

He is considered a master of capturing light and he cited it as his obsession ‘Light is the most important person in the picture.’

This was his Degeba system. This was his preseason. This was his gym reps and turkey and ricotta salad.

Monet did the same thing in different circumstances over and over again. He was savvy enough to run outside after a storm to capture light as it changed to change the environs.

He made the decision to attempt to get better then set up a system to achieve progress.

Bradman had a stump and a golf ball, Pistol Pete dribbled a basketball to and from school in alternate hands. Tiger Woods did the Bunker Drill throughout his teens instead of going to parties.

Balls and brushes are the tools, but the practice is the same exercise in variance.

Warhol’s blotted-line technique was refined from his college years and over two decades as a commercial artist before creating 32 Campbell’s Soup Cans and turning the art world upside down.

Repetition to Warhol was soul-crushing drudgery, it was unifying iteration and refinement of his style.

Sure, the hunger and desire has to be there to get better. If 80% of success is showing up, then you’d better at least attend. The nous to automate varied circumstance while doing so is where the progress is made. The secret sauce, it seems, is to show up and find a way to enjoy the pursuit.

The important bit on getting better isn’t just doing heaps of one thing in one way. It’s doing heaps in different places, ways and spaces with different intentions and varied stakes.

I should point out here that doing so safely is encouraged. Mark Zuckerberg’s tech bro maxim to ‘move fast and break stuff’ is fine when it’s your stuff and not the foundations of decent society.

Finding a framework to allow your curiosity to flourish will keep on dragging you back to something that won’t feel like work.

With some small experience I can tell you that this works. My own desire to improve my photomontage and design skills have led me to a rhythm that sees me waking very early. It has quickly become my favourite part of my day.

This began with a desire to get a new series of works done using a technique I liked. It’s outcome has not only been the series of works but a whole new website and journalling routine that is paying real dividends.

I’ll let you know more about how I approached this ‘mini preseason’ (cliché!) in upcoming posts.

Thanks for having a read. Dan Toomey is the writer of this and the Creative Producer at Fisher Classics. If you’d enjoyed this please subscribe for more articles like this, sporting and cultural moment as well as creative updates from the studio.

Fisher Classics is an independent creative studio based in Australia.

We specialise in sports visual identity, memorabilia, and storytelling — producing collectible artworks design work and art direction that celebrates the craft and memory of Australian and international sport.

Explore our artworks

Like a lot of people today I’m listening to Midnight Oil on repeat. Rob Hirst, a truly great Australian musician has died. A vital, vibrant and lithe drummer for ‘The Oilers’.

I never knew Rob Hirst the fellow. But I met his impossibly high swinging right hand at just the right time for a different youngster trying to figure it all out. There was no record collection, no fan-boying, not even a gig til I was in my 30’s. I just knew that I loved his spirit and what he was about.

Somehow ‘The Best of Midnight Oil’ had made it onto our family computer’s Winamp player in 1997. Probably one of about 6 albums total on that machine that was used to connect to the primitive internet through mums work connection.

This was a long way past Midnight Oil’s halcyon days. The vitality of the band in the 1980’s was palpable in my parents generation. This was a band that mattered and mattered to them. They seemed a foreign entity to the decade that produced Kylie and Jason, Crocodile Dundee and Koala Blue. But somehow their staunch argument with the country made them feel more ingrained in its culture than the cartoonish promoters of the land down under.

Before the Oils, it was Rage Against the Machine. Stupidly, I wore them like a set of the latest Vans; virtue signalling that I was vaguely political because I knew some of the lyrics. I was truly a Rollerblade anarchist. It wasn’t until much later that I grasped the scale of the atrocities and injustice Rage were shouting about. This was grown up stuff and I was playing dress-ups as a 15 year old.

But me and my drama room mates all knew that it meant something - we wanted our music to be about something in the way that you want to feel important as a teen.

Hirst’s snap to attention on ‘Forgotten Years’ was a clear memory as I spent more time with my aging war veteran grandparents. His beat insists his message, it pushes and pushes like a tide though jangling guitar; don’t let peace grow into complacency. Grandparents war mates were passing. The media was starting to celebrate and glorify war service. Politcians leaned into the notion of war as national identity.

“This was Hirsts answer to Born in the USA“ his Grandfather and Father had experienced war and had said it was up to future generations to remember the atrocities of war to avoid them.

All of a sudden things for the Rollerblade anarchist were conflicted - what is it to respectfully commemorate but not effectively celebrate? Forgotten Years didn’t solve my unease but it gave it a rhythm and a pulsing reminder.

Another teenage mate and dedicated musician was a fan. It seemed so misplaced to be weird underground fans of an Aussie band that our parents loved in a decade that was all about the latest stuff from the states.

Years later once he was an established touring drummer we were talking about the band at a party.

‘Mate, you cannot possibly hit ‘em harder than Hirsty’.

Technically, my mate loved Hirsty’s ‘Attack’ on the drums. Without knowing what this drumming nerd meant - I knew exactly what he meant. The epic high swing. The full body press into the skins. It was a lightning strike and a generator. Hirst worked in concert with Peter Garret to power a performance that nobody in the country could match.

Garrets staccato moves that punch along in songs like Read about it literally punch out Hirst’s beat. King of the Mountains pounding beat fills Garret and the audience from the ground up and into a soaring vocal -’ Heeeeeey! Mountain in the shadow of light!’

In 1998 at school, it wasn’t good to be different at all. It was a very fast route to the outstide. The middle, the safe were celebrated and hiding parts of yourself was a survival instinct. Redneck Wonderland was released by the Oilers that year. Watching Garret on TV fulled by his mate Hirst all pogoed and sharp and unsmoothed blew recognised stagecraft away. This wasn’t Michael Hutchence mincing about with a mic. It was unspoken and electric two hander performance art - it didn’t make sense but it worked. Their symbiosis encouraged me to be brave, that you could do amazing, creative things with teamwork.

Another teen friendship formed immediately with an anxious lad who delivered vulnerable and raw performance in a drama class despite the bored footy players in the class. They were on the bludge and mercilessly teased his monologue. I’d leapt to his defence, knowing how powerful and brave a move it was. We recalled it only recently as the moment that we became friends.

This was the same year our motley crew walked out of class to protest One Nation in Melbourne with a concurrent protest in Sydney. The Rollerblades were off and social awareness was starting to have more meaning for me and my drama room buddies. We were naive but switching on. Getting the significance of what was happening around us.

It felt like the country was growing up in the same way we were; awkwardly and often tripping over ourselves. Slowly Australia was learning to talk about itelf and growing in confidence. Culturally it was moving on from the Menzian hangover after a decade of media blast from the USA. The 2000 Olympics felt like a debutant ball of national significance. There was a bizarrely unifying anxiety that we’d stuff this up in the eyes of the world.

Forgiving some inevitable shmaltz (Victa Mowers, Nikki Webster) my drama room buddies gathered with cheap beer in a sharehouse. We were keen to see how the Oilers closed the games. Amazingly they were replacing The Seekers who couldn’t perform.

Their silent protest at revealing ‘SORRY’ on their jumpsuits was celebrated like we’d scored. Beer went flying and a coffee table got broken. We jumped up and down on the couch and high-fived. The moment had come. No Prime Minister could ignore that clear and simple message. It was a moment that meant something and it felt like we were a part of it.

I didn’t get the chance to see Hirst perform until I was in my 30’s. The Music Bowl in 2017 where he seemed to skin a watertank in a drum solo that started in the 1980’s but somehow seemed current. He’d have been 61 at this point.

Hirst’s classic outfit of cut off sleeves with his wiry limbs reminded me of the shearers at my cousins farm in the Wimmera. Lean and leathery. All tendon and muscle. He was the engine of a pub hardened political art rock band. By now, the crowd reflected him - mature and cultured with a penchant for a bit of bedlam.

What he modelled for us drama kids was that you could be creative, collaborative have a message and belong. You didn’t need to be the frontman to make a difference.

Well may he be remembered. Thanks for the tunes, Hirsty.

Thanks for having a read. Dan Toomey is the writer of this and the owner of Fisher Classics. If you’d enjoyed this please subscribe for more articles like this, sporting and cultural moment as well as creative updates from the studio.

In 2020 I was locked up in Melbourne like everyone else in the depths of COVID. My job as a Digital Producer was a good one, working to create small web builds for different clients. I’d taken a design class to up my skills and tapped into some more advanced coding.

As an outlet and a way to practice my new-found skills I had decided to build a website but didn’t know what I wanted to make. I had the time and was looking for a little sanity project. A search on some design portfolio sites led to the work of Matt Stevens and his amazing series ‘Good movies as old books’.

Matts incredible imagination triggered the exact thing I was looking for; a graphic exploration of a fun idea. His site seemed straightforward enough and I the idea of figuring out how to make something look like an old book in photoshop appealed more than making sourdough (remember that?).

Cricket is a huge passion for me. I love the game but never really had the capacity for the stats and a lot of the tedium that accompanies its endless rules. I knew that I loved cricketers for their energy and not their average or strike rate. They were heroes of epic stories for me, always, from Bradman to Hazelwood.

Friends of mine had become cricket journalists but I’d lacked their diehard specificity for numbers, dates and averages.

With movies on the brain and images of cover drives in my head I wondered, if cricketers careers had a title, what would they be?

So after stuffing about a bit and some incredibly clumsy work between Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, I had my first image.

The good news was that I had a huge amount of time to refine the concept and the presentation. A friend with some contacts helped me to nut out the commercial viability of selling posters and asked a bunch of questions I didn’t have any answers for.

‘How are you going to sell them?’

‘How can people find you?’

‘How are you going to print these?’

Some Instagram stalking of similar illustrators and graphic artists allowed me to figure some things out. I’d need a site with a payment gateway, shipping materials and a printer. All the while I was taking photographs of books from my fathers library and learning how to isolate their shape and feel in Photoshop.

The learning curve was incredibly steep. I had spare COVID income so I sound a second-hand printer that I had no idea how to operate (I cannot ever recommend doing this by the way). Before I knew it I was deep in manuals and ICC profiles and printer queues. Test prints were a bit of a disaster and the pressure of the lockdowns was starting to get to me a bit.

It was time to focus on something that I felt I could see improvement in; I got busy creating artworks and kept refining. I had at least 8 artworks I was happy with and a workflow that worked.

I’d sent some test images to an incredibly entrepreneurial contact in London for a bit of advice. He provided an excellent sounding board. It was at the end of a Zoom call with him that the name came.

‘A good thing to think about is how you are going to describe these so people know what they are’ was the question.

‘I dunno mate we’ll just call them something like Fisher Classics’ I blurted out.

Fisher is the name of a bat latherer in Melbourne that made iconic hand-crafted cricket bats in my youth. Classics was the nod to the literary monolith Penguin Classics that these book covers are modelled of. Boom; it stuck.

A follow up meeting explored the branding further. By then I’d whipped up a logo, fonts and a style treatment for the whole brand. The website was underway and I’d got under the hood with some coding.

It’s hard to understate how crucial this project was to my mental health at the time. We were into our 100^th day of lockdown and there had been some grim, grim times for Melburninans. I prepared for these Zoom calls like a job interview. I was nervous but prepared.

The creative fun pixel-pushing stuff was coming to a point it was ready to publish and a new dawn was approaching. This is one that no arts school ever tells students persuing a creative career; its about spreadsheets, bottom lines, relationship management, marketing and negotiation. A healthy dose of luck is also handy, too.

An artist friend urged me to publish the site and put it all out there. I’d been seriously faffing about and asking obscure, perfectionist questions about the site padding and colour scheme.

‘Mate, done is better than perfect. Do it or you’ll never get it out there.’

I hit the big green button at the start of cricket season 2020. I flicked some emails off to people who’d given me a hand, made a cocktail with Adelle and went to bed pleased to have completed a job well done.

I awoke to an amazing amount of emails and messages via Twitter. A few people in cricket had given the whole thing a bump and Fisher Classics had its first orders. There were orders from Holland, India and the UK as well as Sydney and Perth.

The new dawn had arrived. I had to figure out shipping internationally (never done that before) and a client had put me in touch with a reseller in the UK. My accidental career as a working (and amazingly, International) graphic artist had begun. My creative synapses were firing off like New Years fireworks and I was furiously googling how to negotiate a deal.

The whole thing had gone off in a way that I hadn’t anticipated and I was on a totally unexpected career divergence. Here I was with something that had happened organically that people seemed to respond to with a bit of change in the pocket.

That was until it all just stopped. Interest died down and orders dried up. The next phase of the creative mission was a learning incline in promotion and business that made Everest look like a foothill.

The journey from there to now is legitimately one of graft and education; plenty more on those many, many misses and occasional hits another time, but the upshot is simple; Fisher Classics is now mostly graft and a tiny amount of my time is spent making nice pictures.

So I’d created this thing, that I’ve discovered is now called a creative studio, and am persisting with it. This little creative project has artworks with athletes across the globe and in iconic sporting clubs. It’s introduced me to top athletes and incredibly talented artists.

Hope you’ll hang around for more stuff from the studio.

Thanks for taking a read. Field Notes is the journal of things that Fisher Classics Creative Studio investigates - the intersection of sport and creativity; notes about design and culture in sport and the creative stuff we get up to.

You can check out our artworks in our online store.

The wild hair, the broken back and comeback, the headbands, the chants of “Lill-ee! Lill-ee!” rolling through the MCG.

When The Chappell Foundation asked me to create an artwork for their 2025 Dinner — with Lillee as guest of honour — I knew it needed to capture more than a likeness. It had to distill the myth.

I began with Lillee’s own words in The Art of Fast Bowling. While it’s often seen as a technical manual, I approached it as scripture — a window into how Lillee combined physicality with intellect. Before Lillee, fast bowlers were blunt weapons; he turned the role into craft.

From there, I layered in other influences:

• Greek mythology for the sense of heroism and transformation.

• Macbeth and Faustus for the theme of sacrifice — the price of greatness.

• Journalistic insight from Gideon Haigh and Peter Lalor, whose work helped me understand Lillee not just as a force, but as a craftsman.

The resulting artwork, The Making of a Fast Bowler, is part figure, part myth. A bowler forged in fire and memory, surrounded by the smoke of legend. It’s a piece that speaks to Lillee’s singular presence, but also to the stories that have carried him forward.

For me, it’s a way of saying thank you — to the generations who passed those stories down, and to a game rich enough to turn men into myths.

Making of a Fast Bowler is available as a limited edition print in the print store. This work was originally created for the 2025 Chappell Foundation Dinner and raised funds at their auction.

The Sporting Globe and the Making of Modern Footy

Launched in 1922 as part of Keith Murdoch’s strategy to fend off new rivals, the Globe didn’t just report football but it helped define how Australians consumed it. Before television, before radio took hold, the Sporting Globe was the closest thing fans had to a replay. It was ritual: you left the game, grabbed the pink paper from the newsagent, and relived it all again through tightly written in breathless reports.

It was a newspaper built for the working-class football public; The one-eyed Collingwood fan, suburban battlers, and front bar selectors. When Collingwood won, newsagents near Victoria Park stayed open late. When they lost, shutters came down early. Football’s mood had a physical presence in the streets, and The Globe was its barometer.

But this was more than nostalgia; The Globe was a bold innovation. It gave us player plebiscites and crowd-driven storytelling. It covered both VFL and VFA with serious weight. It pulled in journalists from all corners of the newsroom and even hired former players to pen columns, years before “special comments” became a TV thing.

Importantly, it didn’t flinch from the politics of the game. Rule changes (as I’ve mentioned before) stirred controversy. The paper covered them with urgency, humour, and detail. It helped shape public opinion and, in doing so, became an unlikely stakeholder in the game’s evolution.

For those of us at Fisher Classics, the Sporting Globe is a key cultural artefact. It’s proof that sport isn’t just played, it’s retold, argued over, reconstructed. Our own sports art leans on that idea: that memory and ritual are part of the game’s design. What the Globe did with pink newsprint, we now try to do with print and paper of a different kind.

Today, footy still rides the same waves of winter gloom, rule angst and finals anticipation. The media platforms have changed, but the rhythm is familiar. And the Globe was there first. It seemed to give a voice to the crowd long before microphones were clasped by the networks.

The NFL booked Snoop Dogg for the 2022 Super Bowl Halftime Show, one of the most-watched cultural events in the world. That performance was celebrated as a triumph of hip hop’s mainstream acceptance, not condemned.

It’s not the first time the AFL has looked to the NFL for cues. The rise of ‘fan engagement’ and the game-day spectacle model all mirror what the NFL has perfected. Snoop’s inclusion isn’t controversial in that it’s part of the AFL’s long-term strategy to mimic America’s biggest sporting stage.

Snoop’s Wiki makes for an incredible read. Coming up in the breakout years of Gangsta rap in the early 1990’s he’s risen to the top of the charts on a persona that has been challenging for many. He backed down from a dangerous lifestyle after a 1993 murder charge saying that his behaviours would end in an assassination or a prison term.

Snoop is often cited as a symbol of a misogynistic gangsta rapper from this time. Ironically, this is because he’s still culturally relevant three decades later. He’s quite literally the last one on the dance floor. Ice Cube faded out in some awful comedies and Ice T got the SVU treatment.

Snoop Dogg has been many things across four decades: gangsta rapper, gospel artist, family-friendly TV star, cooking-show host, sports commentator. He’s reinvented himself cannily and engaged. Crucially, his attitudes have evolved alongside him.

Back in 2012, Snoop declared that “hip hop is ready to accept openly gay rappers”. That was over a decade ago. This is hardly the stance of a man frozen in prejudice.

Since then, Snoop has;

• Released the gospel double album Bible of Love (2018), positioning himself within a genre deeply tied to inclusion and community

• Collaborated with openly queer artists such as Big Freedia (on the Beetle in the House remix and the film Take Me to the River: New Orleans)

• Appeared on TV with RuPaul, one of the most visible LGBTQ+ entertainers in the world

• Publicly credited peers like Pharrell Williams and Dionne Warwick for helping him evolve his lyrics towards respect rather than misogyny

The weight of recent evidence points to an artist who has shifted and broadened, not one who remains stuck in outdated prejudice.

The AFL Grand Final has almost always gone safe yet the public sentiment seems to will the pregame entertainment to tank. Garry Lyon questioned whether Snoop could get an Australian crowd going. We are somehow sceptical of Grand Final performers despite their decades of experience and hit albums. Nostalgia acts like Sting, Jimmy Barnes, Bryan Adams and the very safe Ed Shearan dominate the billing.

Against that backdrop, Snoop Dogg is a bold choice. He’s global, multi-generational, and still culturally relevant. If anything, this is the first time the AFL has booked someone who represents the scale of the event rather than just another misty-eyed, good-old-days, nostalgia act.

They did so in 2023 with the booking of KISS for the Grand Final entertainment (FWIW I loved it too). Aside from the usual questions about if they could manage the posting, their show and visit was controversy free.

But given the treatment Snoop is getting from Football media and public, should it have been?

Simmons was banned for life from Fox News (now THAT is saying something) in 2017 after barging into a meeting, exposing his torso, insulting female staff, and hitting them with his book. He also carries a decades-long reputation for misogyny and crude remarks. There were sexual misconduct claims in 2019 (the case was settled, Simmons denies the claims).

One Herald Sun reporter walked out on an interview with him in the 1990’s. Yet when KISS played the AFL Grand Final in 2023, it was framed as a masterstroke of showbiz and there was no question of Simmons past as being problematic to their booking.

Why is it that Simmons’ history is excused while Snoop’s legacy, despite his evolution, is framed as disqualifying? The difference in treatment is glaring, and it speaks less to moral clarity than to cultural bias. Footy is ok with KISS but not too sure about Snoop.

The AFL deserves criticism and should be held accountable. Its booking of Snoop Dogg is not hypocrisy; It is an acknowledgment of his status as a cultural icon who has changed his views and behaviours.

To reduce Snoop’s entire legacy to his lowest moments is to miss the more interesting truth: he is one of the few artists who has shifted with the times, embraced inclusivity, and remained relevant across four decades. That is precisely why the NFL embraced him, and why the AFL has done the same.

You can’t drop it like it’s hot when you’ve been cancelled.

Isak Rankine’s alleged homophobic slur to a Collingwood player has been defended by his club and media supporters. They claim a double standard; how can Rankine be penalised to potentially miss a Grand Final when the AFL have booked a known homophobe in Snoop Dogg?

The current media discourse oversimplifies the situation. The Age’s framing of “hypocrisy” between Rankine’s ban and Snoop’s booking ignores the distinction between a player actively using a slur in 2025 and an artist whose last widely cited homophobic moment dates back years, followed by a documented shift in attitudes (Michael Gleeson actually says ‘Blah blah blah’ in a real moment for journalism).

News.com.au’s suggestion that Snoop’s presence “lays bare” hypocrisy fails to grapple with the nuance: attitudes evolve, and public figures can demonstrate change. To erase that possibility is to freeze culture cyogenically and deny the complexity that art, artists and humans inevitably carry.

Current Snoop Kids Content; Respect Everyone by Snoop Dogg

These incidents are not comparable because one is about a players current conduct and the other an entertainers past from which they have clearly grown and evolved.

The court of public opinion demands consistency from the AFL in matters of the tribunal. Head high bumps and perceived accidents are met with varied judgements and fans and commentators are frustrated at subjective decision making.

But the AFL’s punishments are not about theatre or optics; they are about outcomes. For the past 18 months the league has drawn a clear red line on homophobic language, punishing slurs at both AFL and VFL level with consistency. That’s how cultural change happens: not overnight, but through repeated sanctions that shift behaviour. Too often the conversation fixates on the length of a ban, rather than asking whether the punishment creates the conditions for growth.

And this is where Snoop Dogg himself offers perspective. His early career carried the flaws of a different time, but over decades he has shifted. He’s cited conversations with Pharrell Williams and Dione Warwick as part of these changes. His career proves that consideration can lead to reinvention, and that change is possible when individuals are given the space to grow.

The AFL is not hypocritical for punishing Rankine and booking Snoop; it is applying the same principle in two different contexts. Punishments are supposed to be about transformation, not erasure. Rankine, like Snoop before him, has the chance to learn, to evolve, and to return stronger.