SECRETS OF MY SUCCESS: Steve Aldridge, Creative partner, Partners Andrews Aldridge.(Brief Article)(Company Profile)

I wasn't the sharpest pencil in the pencil case at school. I was good at football and art, not a recipe for success, particularly when it was a Welsh school and they only played rugby.

My first experience with commercial art was doing other people's art homework in the playground for money. Perhaps this was my first exposure to real direct marketing. I'm not sure it was a career option at the end of the 70s, although I did go on to work with Lester Wunderman who told me, and I believe him, that he invented direct marketing in New York around the same time. So while he forged his vision I went to art school to study graphic design and later, advertising.

I feel lucky that art education then was as much about learning drawing and craft skills as it was about ideas. Many of the techniques I learnt then - making mock-ups and one stroke lettering - are skills I still use today. While at college I also worked in a local department store's display department where I created new ideas for windows.

My time as the very uncreatively-titled Head of Display and Window Dressing taught me a lot about creating a theme and sticking to it. It taught me how to create an impact with a big space, how to make groups of objects work together and how to create a visual linkage between those objects.

Even how to find ways to execute what seems to be impossible. Believe me, Yellow Pages is every bit as good as The Creative Handbook. And very handy if the next step is art direction.