Exeter's unassuming co-op worker leads double life as 'Lord of the Logos'
48 comments
·April 5, 2025columb
mattl
Wasn’t expecting to see Exeter on the homepage for sure.
dotBen
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.
physicsguy
Not really, there’s a bit of one in Bristol, but from what I see of job postings down there, salaries aren’t that high, comparable to much of the rest of the U.K. outside of London
The MetOffice has their software stuff down in Exeter but it’s <£45k for people with experience in scientific computing and HPC
mattl
Heh, not sure. I moved to the US in 2008. I think you and I talked about this when you were at WordCamp Boston when you were doing stuff with WPEngine.
I think at least one of the W3C staff is in Devon.
xanderlewis
Wasn't expecting to see the Co-op.
sieste
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!"
kilpikaarna
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
> 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."
anticorporate
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.
manarth
Although it's nominally and legitimately a "co-operative", the Co-Op in question is a large national supermarket chain in the UK.
Working there is like working any retail job, and a far cry from a small community co-op.
vvpan
As they say - name checks out. I have been really into the idea of cooperatives lately. It is a topic that deserves more light seeing the extreme centralization of corporate wealth. Sadly most non-legal info about co-ops out there always goes back to Mondragon. There needs to be more media about non-corporate organizations. US farming and electrification was largely driven cooperatives, for example, but one rarely hears much about it.
bongodongobob
Yeah money isn't everything after you made a bunch. What.
nobodyandproud
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
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.
y42
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.
PaulRobinson
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.
wffurr
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
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
mkl
Firefox Android supports uBlock Origin just fine (I didn't see a single ad or modal in this article). There is no need for obscure forks, and Iceraven is "Definitely not brought to you by Mozilla!", as the first sentence on the page says.
switch007
It's an ad blocker testing site that occasionally has some news
lukecarr
A DevonLive article on HN: this must be one of the four horsemen!
dmje
Ah, town of my teen years, hidden under 300 pop ups and adspam
flippant
Archived copy
treetalker
Logos as in corporate designs, not Greek / Christian logos.
A_D_E_P_T
Yeah I totally thought this was going to be about some new religious or spiritual movement.
IshKebab
Heavy metal logos, not corporate logos.
brendoelfrendo
"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.
senderista
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.
shermantanktop
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
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
m463
so exeter co-op is a grocery store?
FearNotDaniel
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].
AndrewDucker
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.
mattl
There’s multiple different businesses doing business as “the co-op” in the UK IIRC, somewhat based on geography but with different branding too.
gerdesj
There are these ones in the UK these days:
https://www.co-operative.coop/about-us/history https://www.co-operativebank.co.uk/about-us/
When a Brit talks about "The Co-op", they (we) mean the stores. The bank always has bank appended to its name.
fitsumbelay
very cool story
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)