He says: "After I left college I did some bits and pieces of freelance from home. I wrote off to between 20 and 25 companies and got eight replies, one of which was Newell & Sorrell. They asked me in to do placement and then offered me a job and it has been really good."Another successful job applicant is Gary Deardon, who gained an HND in graphics design from East Croydon College last summer. He got his first placement as a result of a talent scout seeing his work at the college's end-of- year show and then after a number of unsuccessful attempts was given a job by Michael Peters Limited. He says: "When I started on placement I ran errands and did endless photocopying so I try to ensure that the people we get in on placement have a chance to get some real work experience."One such is Nigel Coan, who graduated last year from High Wycombe with a BA in graphic design.

More important, they are also given the chance to work on real projects.Simon Wright, senior designer at Newell & Sorrell, which numbers amongst its clients British Airways, the Body Shop and Waterstone's, is responsible for selecting graduates. Once they get taken on they can expect a starting salary on average of between pounds l0,000 and pounds 13,000."But getting taken on is the biggest hurdle. Although there is a shortage of good graphics graduates most design companies still operate a placement system which means that graduates join the company for anything from two weeks to a couple of months, are paid a basic salary, given some work experience and then, if they make the grade, are given a job.It is a system open to abuse, and horror stories of graduates working for nothing but their bus fare and a sandwich, who are then turfed out having learned nothing from their placement but how to operate the photocopier, abound. However, design companies say that this sort of exploitation has largely disappeared and most pay those on placement a living wage of between pounds 100 and pounds 150 a week plus lunch and travel expenses. Because nobody recruited during the recession there is a real skills gap and a shortage of people with a bit of experience. The other problem we have is that we are based in Henley on Thames.

While it's very beautiful, it seems that most young things want to work in central London."Paula Carrahar of Major Players, design recruitment specialists, adds: "There are a lot of jobs for design graduates out there and the market is certainly healthier than last year. However, the situation is now improving; clients are once again commissioning, so design companies across all sectors need everything from complete beginners to those with two or three years experience. David Goudge of the Brand Development Business, branding specialists, says: "We are desperate for a couple of juniors and one or two people with a couple of years experience. The industry was badly affected by the recession as clients decided they could do without new packaging, corporate identities or interiors. As a result design companies simply couldn't afford to take on new graduates. It isn't just proud parents flocking to art college degree shows this summer - scouts from the UK's leading design companies are scouring the shows too for the next generation of talent.

The prospects for this year's crop of design graduates is probably better than at any time in the past six years. One is another bash at Alice "with historical footnotes", so he can stop playing it on-stage. He did play three songs from the other, Mystic Journey, though - two as good as anything he's written, the third, "Doors of Heaven", a well-meaning but horribly "Imagine"-esque piece of whimsy that will probably be a minor hit for somebody.He was called back to the stage three times before signing off with the gorgeous, implausibly titled "Gabriel's Mother's Hiway Ballad # 16 Blues", and that perennial end-the-encores gambit "Goodnight Irene".. Well, nobody else had done it before or since - and Arlo certainly wasn't going to do it tonight.Instead, he turned in a fabulously entertaining set of songs that included, bizarrely, virtually everything from the flip-side of that first record - beautiful, long-overshadowed songs like "Chilling of the Evening" and "Highway in the Wind" - plus a handful of latterday gems, including Steve Goodman's "City of New Orleans".He read a poem about a moose, from a recent book project entitled Assorted Moose Poems, which had just, he informed us, gone to a second printing "'cos another guy wanted one...".Although astute enough to bond with his still largely Woodstock generation audience through ribald nostalgia, and although the new songs still sound like the old ones (no bad thing, necessarily), Guthrie's heart is in the present - much of his personal earnings go towards funding the Guthrie Centre for Aids and child abuse research.He had just, he said, recorded two new albums. Rambling humour, though, has always been part of Guthrie's oeuvre. The son and heir of Woody Guthrie - dust-bowl balladeer, rights activist and composer of America's alternative national anthem "This Land Is Your Land" - Arlo has built up an eclectic catalogue of work which shares the essence of his father's values but adds spirituality, musical magpie-isms and idiosyncrasies by the truckload.It's something of an albatross to the man that he's still known today for his first, biggest and longest record, Alice's Restaurant, released in 1967, a 20-minute musical broadsheet about trying to dump some garbage on Thanksgiving Day and later made into one of those "of its time" films. The scale of Guthrie's self-deprecating wit may have been an eye-opener for a crowd who, while clearly familiar in a rose-tinted sort of way with his clutch of classics from a long time ago, had almost certainly never seen him live Or assumed he was dead. God willing.Morris West's 'Vanishing Point' is published by HarperCollins at pounds 15.99.