As recently as June of last year Jack Rogers (the man behind GETAREALJOBKID) was dividing his time between an uninspiring coffee-shop job and a growing art-design business.
Growing up with the awareness that for many people creative work isn’t real work, Jack finally realized his print commissions were taking up so much of his day, that it was time for his wryly titled GETAREALJOBKID design platform to become his only job … well that and making music (if that’s a job), Jack’s a busy guy!
Jack talks about working with bands like Full of Hell, his DIY ethos, his own music making and what inspired him to go down the path he’s on right now.
What is Get a Real Job Kid, if you were going to pitch it to someone or just describe it?
As a hobby that got incredibly out of control. I think that’s the best way to sum it up.
I have played in bands all my life and I was always the go to person to do posters and flyers and T shirt designs, because no one else wanted to do it.
Friends bands needed them, my bands needed them and I was like, “Well, I’ve downloaded a dodgy copy of Photoshop. I can knock something up on my computer if you want.”
One day, I was with a band. I was just doing a poster and one of the members of this band was like, how do you do this? Do you charge for this? Do you do this for a living? And I was like, No, I just do it for fun. And he was like, You should really start an Instagram, because people would pay for this.
I started an Instagram in 2018/ 2019. I’ve never liked a nine to five. I hate working. I’ve had office jobs and worked in coffee shops, all these normal jobs and I’ve never liked it.
I see my brother and my parents that do it and I think, “wow, I wish my brain was just like: this is what you need to do”. I go a bit like cabin fever if I have that set routine. The Get a Real Job Kid thing was just like creative arts is kind of shunned [to some people it’s] not a real job. It was kind of a fuck you to people that think the creative industry isn’t a proper job
Do you have some other work that you have to do to pay the bills, or can you actually now just do music and the printing?
I was working part time at a coffee shop and part time doing this, then in between playing shows with bands, it was really busy.
It got to the point where I had to stop. I had to take days off work at the coffee shop to catch up with work from my design job and it didn’t make any sense.
I remember speaking to my boss, being like, I’m so overwhelmed with doing the design stuff and I remember her just being like, “well, you have to make a decision that you do this full time and you commit to it or you don’t”.
So I took the plunge in June. I was super super nervous because I’d never never done anything like this full time. I’d never been self employed before full time. It ended up being — touch wood — so far really good.
Well, it sounds like you built up to it in the right kind of way.
Yeah, I didn’t plan for that either. I was very happy with it being just a part time fun thing that I did, in a similar way that I treated the bands I played in where it’s just like a creative outlet.
The fact it’s kind of transformed into a career is awesome.
On your website you say “I like to make things with bits of paper, a photocopier in my brain.” Is it still a tactile thing for you, or have you moved into doing your work digitally?
It’s really case by case. Way, way back when I was younger, I would make scrapbooks. I started out doing it with bits of paper and glue and scissors and stuff.
That kind of stuff is very time consuming, putting things together in a physical sense, but I try to do that as much as possible. I’d say at the moment 60% of it is digital, and 40% of it is like physical stuff, but I try to start most things with some sort of scanned image.
Have you had or considered any major projects? Or has it really been that the individual commissions have occupied all your time?
I’ve been lucky with commissions. I fell into this weird, punk/hardcore/metal world where a lot of those kinds of bands were reaching out to me.
Apart from that I make my own zine. I just did a zine for Valentine’s Day. I made like 200 and they sold out in two or three hours.
Could you talk a bit more about the zines?
They’re handmade. I print out a lot of my own personal designs that I do for my Instagram as well. I just compile them into a book.
I’ve done one called the color of loss. The most recent one was the color of love, which was for Valentine’s Day. It was a pink cover. And it had nice typography and then lots of designs and ideas based around the concept of love, or loss or anything to do with that kind of human emotion.
I didn’t really advertise it apart from Instagram. They sold really quickly and again, that’s something that was just a personal project.
How valuable would you say that social media has been?
It annoys me how much it dictates my work life because I fucking hate it so much. It’s a tool I have to use.
I like that my design pages are anonymous. I like that no one knows what I look like or even what my name is, until someone sees me on an email. They don’t know who they’re talking to. It’s solely art driven.
I’ve always felt uncomfortable even selling stuff through my Instagram.
So I try to make things as cheap as possible. If I do sell things, and when I do sell things, it’s very sporadically
I don’t want to be another Instagram account telling people to buy stuff. It’s not my style for sure. I want it to be as accessible as possible.
I saw you designed something for Full of Hell. How did that come about?
The Full of Hell stuff would have been on the last UK and European tour they did. They took out a t-shirt of mine. That was again, annoyingly, through Instagram. Dylan, the singer, found some of my work and he hit me up.
They would have taken a design of mine, I think for the tour they did with Converge in England. I actually saw one in real life. A lady at another show walked in wearing it. I love seeing my stuff.
At a festival last summer I think I saw 10, 15 Different T-shirts I’d done. My handwriting is so terrible. I was just like, “there’s my handwriting and there’s my handwriting”. It was everywhere. Strange, but I do like it. It’s nice to see it printed up.
How does it work from a licensing point of view when you do a commission for a design?
I have a super DIY, punk ethos. I take a one hit commission and they can do whatever they want with it.
Unless it’s like a massive, massive band and I know that that’s going to be replicated a million different times in different ways. I’ll charge a bit more then, but usually I just take a one time commission payment and then send them the file.
As we’re talking about clients, I’m curious, especially because of the timeline, about Type O Negative.
So that email came in and I thought it was a joke, because in my mind I was like “well one of them is dead, they surely can’t be making music anymore”. It was for an anniversary thing [for Dead Again]. A label wanted me to do some layouts for some T-shirts and some merchandise.
That was a fun one. It was one of those jobs where you kind of put your own spin on things that have already been created, which is really cool, because you’re given all this crazy art that’s done by someone else and you get to essentially fuck it up and do what you want with it.
Look at your list of clients, you’ve got Warner Music Group listed there. Was that connected to the Type O Negative commission?
Someone from Warner Music followed me on Instagram, hit me up and I again I thought it was a spam email where they were like, “we’re really interested in having you as a freelance designer for some of our clients. We’ve got a list of bands we think you’d work really well with’.
I kind of sheepishly replied back, like “this sounds cool” and they sent me NDAs and contracts.
I was just like, “I think they’re gonna rob my identity”. I’d sent them all my information. I just sat there for, I don’t know, three weeks with nothing back. I sat there thinking, “yeah, they’ve robbed me, this isn’t real” and it was real.
The Type O stuff came through Warner and then Type O hit me up again independently, to buy some of the designs that I’d already submitted through Warner.
When you’re pitching your work, is there a particular big name you worked with that you usually mention?
Yeah, for sure. I think it depends on the age of the client, because I’d definitely drop Type O if it was an older person. They were such a huge inspiration to so many people.
My Chemical Romance was cool. I love working with Bring Me the Horizon. I do a lot of stuff with them and I really liked the Full of Hell stuff. That’s a great band I’ve listened to for years and getting to do even one thing with them was a privilege.
I want to delve a little bit into your backstory. You’ve mentioned how the art actually came out of being in music first. How did your interest in having different creative outlets develop?
It was finding Dookie by Green Day, like 1000s and millions of other people. They were my gateway band into that world.
I grew up in a house where my dad would play the Beatles and the Who and the Jam and all that kind of stuff. I put Green Day on and I was like, “this is like the Beatles and the Who, it’s a bit more gritty and it had a catchy melody”.
It really struck my attention and the artwork was a cartoon. My young kid brain was just obsessed with it. I listened to that album religiously for literally years.
I got a guitar and started learning, met people in secondary school who listened to the same music as me and we would spend most lunchtimes in the music room playing guitar and just goofing around.
Finding out about Green Day and reading the liner notes in albums put me onto bands like Rancid and all the Bay Area punk stuff, which then introduced me to show flyers where you could see a Green Day and Neurosis poster and it was a handmade cut out thing.
That really fascinated me because it looked like something I or anyone could do the same as punk. And anyone’s welcome. No matter who you are, what you look like, your gender, your sexuality, or your race, you’re all welcome there.
I think the art is similar, anyone can do it, if you’ve got a paper and a pen and some tape, you can make something that you can promote. You don’t need to have a degree and that really spoke to me because I never thrived in a classroom environment. I always wanted to just make things and try things out for myself.
I was 15 or 16 and I started going to shows. Everyone was too young to go to the pub, but you could go to a 14-plus show and see three or four bands and pay five pounds or whatever.
So I’d go to shows and that was my first introduction to smaller bands having T-shirts and thinking, “oh, who designed them?” and you ask them and they’re just always like, “got my friend and he drew something for us,” or whatever.
That kind of made my brain think, “you don’t have to do that for a living, you can just do that for fun.” That’s when the trial and error process started where I had no fucking idea what to do.
It was before the days where you could YouTube everything. So I had to just kind of pick apart what I could see from a poster or from an album. I just started making posters for shows that friends were putting on and advertising through MySpace and all that stuff.
So you started performing music about 14 years ago and now you’re in Out of Love. And you’ve had a couple of albums?
We did a couple of EPs
Ah, it’s the usual punk thing. I looked at the track list and went “oh, there’s loads of tracks that must be an album”, but each of them was like a minute long.
Yeah, I think we can do a set of 10 songs. It’s like 22 minutes. We’ve got power violence length songs for a punk band. But that was a lockdown project.
I played in bands growing up through my 20s. I played bass in a band called Acres and we’ve toured all over Europe with a lot of the melodic hardcore bands that I grew up listening to, which was cool.
And during lockdown, me and some local friends wrote a couple of EPs over Zoom. We were lucky enough that a local label put it out over Spotify. Again, another hobby that kind of got a little bit out of control.
Going back to the print and design work, have you got any major projects coming up, or any things on your bucket list that you want to get done in the coming months?
I want to do more personal things. I’d like to do a full book of art and screenshots of processes. But honestly, just keep doing this. I feel very blessed and lucky that I can do this for a living at the moment — doing freelance and being my own boss — but I I know there’s usually a timeline on that.
I feel like I can’t be doing this forever, and if I can sit in a cool in-house job somewhere, that’s kind of the end game, whether that’s with a brand or with a label or whatever.
That’s where my brain is at the moment, but it changes every other day. There’s so many possibilities.
Everyone can make a living doing something and this is what I want to do. If it took me three or four years to figure that out I don’t care.
Artwork courtesy of Jack Rogers
Visit Jack at GETAREALJOBKID to see more of his work and for commissions.
