Jonathan Cooksley is a phenomenon. The most creative person I know, he’s a dad, a designer, an artist and a successful business owner.
He designed the covers of my books, Pazzabaijan and Mr Lizard, the Amp Media logo, and has drawn 13 free tourist maps of Cornwall – a third of a million copies of which are used throughout the county every summer.
I’m very lucky because he’s also a lifelong friend of mine.
I asked Jon to share his thoughts about internet education. This is what he said:
Education really doesn’t focus enough on the internet and, unfortunately, we’re leaving it up to our young people to find their own way, and that’s not ideal.
If I’m not educating my son on a smartphone, the school’s not educating him on a smartphone, then who is? He’s finding his own way, and that obviously impacts our internet safety.
Saying that, we don’t want to stifle creativity. To me, one of the most fundamental parts of the internet is creativity, and the way that we can use new technologies with old ideas…is where the exciting bits happen, and we want to encourage that as much as possible.
Art is my background. I have no objection to teaching people to use traditional materials – (young artists) need to learn those skills but why can’t we be downloading graphics and editing them on online software and calling that art as well?
If art hadn’t progressed, we’d still be painting with blood on cave walls. It sounds comical but we would. We’ve developed acrylic paints, oil paints, watercolour paints. Is this (digital design and editing) part of the next stage? We need to focus on that.
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