History

graphics.coop was started in 1989 as The Graphics Company. The founders were three young designers who had previously worked together in the community printshop at the Environment Centre, Edinburgh. Two of the three had prior experience of co-operatives (Stramullion Publishing and Community Copyart), so forming a co-operative seemed the natural way to go.

Starting off with no capital, we rented desk space and computer time in somebody else's office. Paying by the hour to rent an Apple Mac taught us to work efficiently or risk losing money on a job. A loan from Edinburgh Co-operative Development Agency then allowed us to start buying our own equipment. Computers were just starting to appear in design studios in the late 1980s and they were hugely expensive. We spent most of our time at the drawing board, sketching, letrasetting and pasting up galleys of text and photographs, or slaving over a repro camera in a hot darkroom.

In 1991, we were invited to take up a studio by the 369 Gallery Collective in the Cowgate. We stayed over a decade, expanding in numbers and taking on extra studio space. In the mid-1990s we created our first website and started offering a web design service. Meanwhile, the building changed around us and transformed into the Gilded Balloon, but retained a core of artists' studios. It all came to an abrupt end in December 2002 when the entire building was destroyed in the Cowgate Fire.

Although the fire was a massive shock, we were well placed to survive this disaster with our co-operative structure and comprehensive off-site backups of data. Within a week we were operating from a temporary office in York Place, and we managed to deliver all of the design and print jobs which were in-progress.

In 2004 we moved to our current mews building in Annandale Street Lane. A loan from Co-operative and Community Finance enabled us to remodel the interior, removing partitions, putting in IT infrastructure and converting the garage into a meeting room. We commissioned furniture-makers Mike Anderson and Simon Muir to fit out the studio space.

In 2011 we re-branded ourselves as graphics.coop to put the emphasis on our status as a co-operative.

Our co-op members have come and gone over the years, but we try to keep in touch with former colleagues, and our core co-operative values are unchanged.