Caroline Duffy's graphic design news and stuff

Dwdl

2010-06-17T08:53:00.000-07:00

Oops, it's been a month. Have an owl, or a gwdihw if you prefer. Gwdihw is one of the Welsh words for owl and it's pronounced goo-dee-hoooo, like the sound an tawny owl makes. Welsh is an ace language. My beginners' WLpan course is nearly over and I'll soon be enrolling on the next course up. Gwych!

Other brilliant words for animals:
bochtew (fat cheek) = hamster.
Dwrci (water dog) = otter
Llygoden ffyrnig (fierce mouse) = rat
Moch daear (earth pig) = badger.

How I became a freelance graphic designer

2010-05-17T03:44:00.000-07:00

So in Part One of this thrilling account of my professional life, we saw our hero (me) leave the safe harbour of an agency job in Cambridge and sail off into the sunset in the general direction of freelancing and Cheltenham. But we should probably scoot back a bit and find a bit more about the reasons why all this happened.

My then partner was also a graphic designer. He worked for a publishing company in Cambridge, and when that company relocated to London he was made redundant. While looking for another permanent job, he started to freelance to make ends meet.

And he hated it.

I'd lie awake at night, thinking of all the things he could do to get more work. I sifted through articles on the net, dreamt up strategies and business plans and methods of getting clients. I passed all my wondrous findings on to him which I think he found a) massively irritating and b) of no use whatsoever. The fact is, he wasn't the sort of person who's suited to freelancing. A lot of people prefer to be given their work at 9am, knock off at 5.30 and get a regular, guaranteed amount of money a month. He was one of those. He disliked having to charm people, having to do the admin and the accounts, but most of all I believe he disliked the unpredictability of it all. I, on the other hand, was getting big ideas and itchy feet.

After a few months of searching, he won a job based in Gloucester, art-editing a car magazine. We both wanted to move back west towards our respective homes (his was Cornwall), so I approached my boss and asked him if there was any chance he would employ me remotely. I thought this a good halfway house between safe but single in Cambridge and scary self-employment.

Boss thought about this for a week or so, and said no. But, he said, if you go freelance, I will give you enough work to keep you going every month, until you get other clients. I chewed a biro to smithereens working out exactly how much money I could live on, and lovely Boss agreed to cover a bit more than this amount, and lend me the mac I'd been working with in his office. I saved my pennies and bought a domain name, a scanner, a printer and all the other peripheries, read this, this and this, moved into a tiny one-bedroomed flat in one of Gloucestershire's more hateful suburbs and registered as self-employed with the Inland Revenue on July 12th, 2003.

The next thing, obviously, was to get more clients. As a print designer I knew that printers occasionally were asked to recommend designers, so I called around all the local print businesses with my portfolio. One MD gave me a contact whom I followed up and ended up working with until I'd got successful enough to be able to decide that I'd had enough of his politics and, more importantly, his not paying me on time. I bought the local papers and called up every advertiser, asking if they needed any work doing. I had postcards printed and mailed them out. But my most important jobs came by word of mouth.

I'd started designing a magazine for CIO Connect via my old boss's agency and another agency middleman. CIO Connect decided that they no longer wanted to work with the middleman and approached me directly. I discussed this with my old boss, and offered him a per-page management fee to offset some of what he'd lose with me working with CIO Connect directly. In the end he gave me his blessing to work on the magazine alone without him getting a cut, as it seemed less hassle for all involved. CIO Connect worked closely with another IT member organisation and, after a while, they decided to offer me their magazine, too.

About this time a salesperson from a large printing company called me up. He sold the printing of the magazines to CIO Connect and the other IT organisation, and wanted to meet me. He was thinking of going freelance, and could I offer him any advice? I told him what I could. We kept in touch: I would ask him for print quotes, he occasionally asked me for design advice.

By this stage the other half and I had moved to Bristol, and I remember the print consultant calling me and asking if I'd be interested working on some trade directories for a client of his which also happened to be the UK's largest bathroom retailer. At the time the printer was putting it together and the process was a bit of a mess. Getting me to to the layout work would save time and money. He knew that I had a firm grasp of the reprographic process and that the artwork files I sent to press always passed the preflight, meaning an easier, swifter printing process. We both met the MD and I won the work. And more work. And more work. It seemed that once this client realised how effective good design can be they wanted me to do everything for them. This lasted a couple of years, until the bathroom company realised that they could probably justify employing a designer full-time, so we parted company, and I lost half of my income overnight. I scratched my head for a bit, redesigned my website, had more promotional postcards printed and started all over again. It's unpredictable like that.

Anyway, the best advice I can give someone thinking of doing the same is this:

Get good at your agency job. Confidence in dealing with clients is paramount. Get some solid work behind you so your portfolio impresses.
Get good at economising. Know exactly how much you have coming in and going out every month. Save every spare penny; learn to go without. You'll be glad of this in the first year or so of utter penury.
Make a business plan. Read. Research. Learn about tax and accounts. Ground your dreams in reality as much as possible.
Borrow as little money as you possibly can.
Attitude is all. Want to please your clients.
Know what people are looking for in a designer, and more importantly, what puts them off. A freelancer is potentially flaky as compared with an agency, so project an aura of relaxed reliability. They must believe you easy to work with or they won't go near you. Accurate quotes, hitting deadlines and amenability are probably all more important than creative skills for most clients. Above all, your job is to make your clients' lives easier. Never forget that.
Creativity actually scares a lot of clients. Be very careful about revealing your superpowers until you're sure your client is ready to experience them. It's a sad fact that most businesses want to look like their competitors, but a bit different. Yes, really. Swallow your pride or starve.
I'd recommend using an independent print consultant/purchaser. In my experience, printers don't give the best prices or highest quality service to lowly freelancers. Print consultants buy a lot of print and therefore wield a lot more power, and for the little fat they add on top of the quote you'll get a better service for your clients and piece of mind that things will be sorted swiftly when they inevitably go wrong.
Enjoy the thrill of not knowing what happens next. Having said that, employment can be a lot riskier - you can be made redundant with four weeks' notice. As a freelancer, if you lose a client you generally have a lot more time to adjust and work out your next move, plus you'll already have a website and marketing materials ready to start charming the socks off potential clients all over again.
When something goes wrong and it's your fault, immediately own up to it and offer to put it right. Things go badly - that's life. Taking control impresses people, and they learn they can rely on you in the bad times as well as the good.
Learn time management. I've learned I'm more efficient if I work on one project a day until finished, rather than, say, spending two hours a day on each of three projects. Also learn that you'll have time off in a pretty unpredictable way. Use this time for things like surfing, mooching around charity shops and drinking tea.

That's all for now - I'll add more if I think of any.

How I got my first design job

2010-05-14T03:25:00.000-07:00

I've been contacted quite a lot recently by third-year students of graphic design. They know the industry is a difficult one to penetrate and want advice about the best way of securing a job. I can only describe the path that I followed, and perhaps give a few pointers as to what potential employers might be looking for.

This will be a bit of a story - summarised points at the end for those of you with attention deficit disorder.

It seems I spent about a third of my childhood drawing and painting. I was naturally good at it. I was also naturally good at science and maths, and had an early obsession with colour relationships and the way things fit together. I think most graphic designers have this holy trinity of curiousity, geekery and anal retentiveness. At the age of 10 my teacher would take me out of maths lessons and get me to help design posters for him on the awesome Commodore Amiga the school had just purchased (yep, I'm that old).

After my A levels, I completed a year's Art Foundation at the Glamorgan Centre for Art and Design Technology, where students explore all manner of creative avenues. It was here I first encountered Adobe Photoshop, and glimpsed its awesome potential. After the foundation year I didn't really have a clue what to do, and so sulked off to Australia for a few months. It was there that my uncle put the idea of writing for a living into my head, so I came home, enrolled on a Journalism degree at Falmouth College of Arts, and promptly set about discovering how media interact with their audiences.

This is a pretty important point. People are often surprised when I tell them that my degree is in journalism - it makes no difference, and I would argue that a good journalism course might actually be better preparation than some of the insipid design degrees I've heard about. It's vital to understand how a company, individual, political party, newspaper, whatever, presents itself to an audience; how a visual message is subconsciously communicated. Understanding these theories and practise in working with them is paramount. You can make the prettiest page layout in the world but if it appears irrelevant to your target audience then you, sir/madam, are a piss-poor designer. I'd have a basic read of Louis Althusser and his State Apparatus stuff if you like a bit of theory here. You may not like the way the Daily Mail looks, or Woman's Own, or Nuts magazine for that matter - but there are cast iron reasons why they look that way.

This, I feel, is one of the areas where many design courses seem to fall down. Portfolios I've seen have the students designing to their own audience. They're all surfy and urban and such like. I'd like to see a bit more work practising design for, say, mid-market hotels, cattle-feed merchants, old people's homes.

And here is where reality bites - because, unless you are actually David Carson and luck out with full artistic control of a surf mag, in your first agency job you will be working for clients who are, let's put it this way, unglamorous. Helmet manufacturers. Chemical suppliers. Local councils.

So anyway, I've skipped a bit and rambled and ranted, as is my wont. Towards the end of my degree (in which I'd done more Photoshop, got good at it, learned Quark and surprised the tutor with my layout ideas) I bought the Media Guardian every week and slavishly applied for every single job I could find that was vaguely related to journalism and wasn't in London. I got one reply, from a small agency in Cambridge, and won the job of 'communications assistant'. I did a bit of PR-writing stuff, a bit more Photoshop, a bit more Quark. My boss took me to printers so I could learn how the reprographic process works (this is something else design students NEED TO KNOW and about which they are usually clueless) and how to design in the most cost-effective manner. Our clients gave us more and more design work, and I gradually got better at it. I learned how to deal with clients (years of shitty jobs in the customer service industry helped, too - if you want to learn to pacify an irate, possibly dangerous boor then for heaven's sake, be a barmaid for a while); how to pitch, how to justify design decisions. My boss gave me business cards with 'graphic designer' typed on them (oh that sweet sweet moment!). We took on a talented junior whom I supervised (sort of). And then, after three years, my then partner got a job in Gloucester, so we moved to Cheltenham and I went freelance.

That's it. It's as random and convoluted as that. Here's the advice I'd pass on from my journey:

Sorry to piss on your bonfire, but pretty much forget your degree. It's a beginning not an ending. They don't teach you much of any real use: that's what life is for. A bit of humility about it goes a long way. Confidence is, as they say, a preference, but a willingness to learn is most impressive.
Brush up on your spelling, punctuation and grammar. "Oh, but I'm a Creative. That stuff doesn't matter!" Yes, it does. People will at best think you slap-dash and at worst think you stupid. Read this. (I am aware that every little error I've made in this post will now be flagged up).
Learn how the reprographic process works, and why for the most part, you can't have three Pantone colours, gold foiling and dye-cut holes in every project you do. (Clue - it's bastard expensive).
Learn how digital printing works, and how to design for its limitations.
Try to get work experience in a large agency if you can afford the time (don't ask me - I work out of my spare room). Be as helpful as possible.
Pay attention to all forms of media, even the lowliest. You will work on some lowly stuff at first - get used to the idea. For the most part, this really isn't a cool job. For the most part, you will be altering phone numbers on business cards.
Learn that your job is to keep the client happy. They are paying you. Do not take anything personally. If they don't like what you've done, get back to the drawing board and quit your whinging. Having an artistic temperament will do you no favours whatsoever.
Work on personal projects. Buy yourself a domain name, get yourself a Wordpress site and get yourself known on Twitter and such. Be careful what you publish - it's there forever (note to self: quit the political ranting).
Offer to do pro-bono work for local causes to build up your portfolio. However, just because they're getting you for free it doesn't mean you get to impose a design on them. It's always a negotiation - no matter what your fee.
Put your heart into your work, even the smallest jobs. Every little bit of work has a lesson for you. Learn it.
Be nice to people. Get them to like you. And don't take yourself too seriously.

I'll add more as I think of them, but this'll do for now.

A brilliant alternative to first-past-the-post and proportional representation?

2010-05-07T05:02:00.000-07:00

A brief foray into politics here, folks.

Firstly, I want to stress that I did not invent this idea - I read it in the Guardian a few years' back.

Secondly, I want to stress that I was up until 8am and have had about three hours' sleep.

The system of electoral reform I am about to fling out there to the masses was devised by a group of mathematicians and its beauty is in its simplicity. I cannot find the original article and will amend this blog to post it should anyone be able to find it.

It goes like this: You walk into your polling station and you take your ballot paper and you mark a cross next the the name of every candidate whom you find acceptable. You may mark as many or as few boxes as you wish.

All the votes for every candidate are then added up. Each cross in each box on each ballot paper carries the same weight in the count - there is no preference.

The winner of the election is the candidate who has been voted as acceptable by the most people in that constituency.

Example: I put a cross next to Labour, Liberal Democrats, Green - these are the parties whose policies I find tolerable. You put a cross next to Lib Dem, Conservative. Someone else votes Lib Dem, Labour and Socialist Worker Party.

In the above instance, the Liberal Democrats are the party acceptable to all three voters, and so they win the seat.

Beautiful, no?

Any feedback by cleverer/less exhausted people welcome. And I should say that I don't call the above system proportional representation because I was told last night (by someone who knows more about maths and statistics than me) that it isn't strictly PR. Willing to be corrected on that, too!

Happy hung parliament, folks.

Well, hello there stranger!

2010-05-02T16:19:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, it's been an AEON and I'm a terrible, terrible person. There are a few reasons I've been lax - mostly I've been thinking about the redesign of my website from this to a handsome, slicker Wordpress thingumyjig. I've been playing around with Wordpress and CSS for a client's website and am astounded by the beauty, power and simplicity of both. I'll be able to incorporate this blog as part of my main website, and updating my portfolio will be so much quicker.

The trouble with redesigning my website is that because I'm a graphic designer I can do as I please - there's too much choice. I guess it's like doctors being the worst patients or some such - I have to sit with a pencil and paper and pretend I'm my own client and try to think up words that sum up who I am and the service I provide. Tis a bloody nightmare! The ideas I get for my work with my clients are clear and true, but the possibilities for my own branding are so limitless, the ideas so many and so varied, that they clash and fight and it's a real struggle to get a clean, structured feel. I think I'm getting there, though - watch this space...

Another excuse for my tardiness is that I've been pondering upon the purpose of this blog. At first, as I'd so cleverly used time-consuming Flash to create the portfolio section of my website and then didn't have the time or inclination to update it, I took a blog on as a quick way to upload my newest work to teh internets so that the masses could continue to gasp in joyous awe at my opuses (opi?). But the blog is now wanting to be more than this. I find that, as in everyday life, I want to occasionally inform people of my opinion on a relevant subject. I get sent thought-provoking emails and think about publishing them; I get asked for advice by newly-qualified designers about how to get into the industry. Sometimes I might just want to publish a photo of a nice bit of architecture I see, or some clever design. This blog wants to be more of a diary - what goes on, what inspires and provokes thought.

So expect the following in the near future (I hope by the end of May, when my birthday is, should you wish to send me vintage Champagne and/or a new pair of hot pink Converse All-Stars (size 5, ta muchly):

snazzy new website that will bring unconditional love and world peace to each and every one of us,
advice blogs - how I got into the industry, went freelance, recommendations,
more random photos of stuff I like,
more vaguely-relevant musings,
more short but frequent postings.

Lastly I would like to take this opportunity to apologise to the design students who've been emailing me over the last few weeks for advice about getting started in the industry. I've just been too busy to reply. I will prioritise a blog on this subject, and send you links when done. Thank you for your patience x

Spring is sprung!

2010-03-18T07:51:00.000-07:00

Just dropping by to show you a little illustration I've done for the cover of the Pulse publication I do for the IISP. It's all about green shoots and hope and such - and incorporates the arrow of the IISP logo into the design. Brush work in Indian ink, scanned in and then manipulated in Photoshop, much like the Welsh Music Foundation poster here.

The Ten Commandments of working with Graphic Designers

2010-03-16T13:18:00.000-07:00

1 Thou shalt present thy graphic designer with a well-thought-out brief, considering target audience, likes and dislikes, brand guidelines if relevant, photography & illustration commissioning budget, amount of text and schedule. Thou shalt have this sorted before requesting a quote. Thou shalt present the same brief to all the designers from whom thou art requesting a quote, so that thou art comparing apples with apples and not oranges.

2 Thou shalt consider all the time, thought, hard work, expensive hardware and software, training, skills and creativity involved in the commission before whinging about said quote, sayingst things such as 'my nephew said he couldst design it in MS Paint for twenty quid'.

3 Thou shalt not supply photographs or graphics in Word, Powerpoint or any other Microsoft package. Thy designer has the right to the soul of thy first-born child if this Commandment be broken.

4 Thou shall supply high-quality, high-resolution images if thou requirest that thy publication not look like the dinner of a dog. Heed thy designer's advice on this, for verily, s/he is learn'd. Be prepar'd to pay for such venerable things from istock and such like for they are not that expensive really when thou thinkest about it.

5 Thou shalt NEVER request that thy designer use the typeface known as Comic Sans, for it is the work of Satan.

6 Thou shalt not ask for work to be done for free, on the off-chance that thy bizarre business idea takes off and thou becomest a millionaire.

7 Thou shalt appreciate that now and again thy designer might declare a day off, of which thou willst be told well in advance, and thou shalt not bitch about this. Thou shalt especially not bitch about this when thou decidest to bugger around with thine own schedule and thus suddenly discover that thy designer is busy surfing/snowboarding/knitting kittens whenst thou finally decidest that thou wouldst like to go to press.

8 Thou shalt know that thy designer does not, and will not, use Microsoft Publisher. Requests to do so will be met with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and the star Wormwood shall fall from the sky and poison one-third of the land and one-third of the oceans and the seven-headed serpent of Babylon will arise and everyone shall be made to listen to the Lighthouse Family for thou hast Sinned Mightily.

9 Thou shalt check all proofs very carefully for spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes, as thy designer is employed to make thy marketing materials and so forth look pretty, and not to check whether thou is able to tell the difference between their, there and they're, or indeed if thou hast the presence of mind to correctly use a possessive apostrophe.

10 Thou shalt pay thine invoices on time and thy loins will be sure to bear much fruit*

*not guaranteed

Illustration & poster for the Welsh Music Foundation

2010-03-16T11:25:00.000-07:00

Production music is the music you hear in the background when you're watching a TV drama or such like - royalty-free music that helps add to the on-screen emotional effect. We're making a lot of television in Wales at the moment, and will be making a lot more - but the Welsh Music Foundation is concerned that only a tiny percentage of the production music used in Welsh programmes is actually made in Wales. It's coming up with a guide to help labels, composers and general musical bods create homegrown music for Welsh programmes, and commissioned yours truly to come up with an illustrated poster for an event they're holding to promote said guide. So I thought, how can I illustrate music on TV?

I started off with a doodled pencil drawing of all this drama coming out of an old TV set. Detectives, guns, dogs, children playing, robots, people kissing etc. All this drama would be loosely contained in the five lines of a musical stave (if that's the right term - I only have grade 1 piano).

Once I was happy with the doodle I got out a paintbrush and commenced inking the drawing. Inking allows you to define lines quickly, giving a hierarchy to the illustration and allowing you to scan, clean up and manipulate the drawing in Photoshop a lot easier.

So then I added the stave, colours and textures - I went for a kind of pink/orange/brown look at first but then changed to green to fit the WMF's logo:

You get a really nice texture with ink that I think is difficult to replicate with vector art. I added half-tone patterns for a little roughness and depth. Am particularly proud of the gun and the robot:

So here are the finished posters, in English and Welsh:

Robin Redbreast

2010-02-12T09:17:00.000-08:00

Just dropping in to say check out this gorgeous pic of a robin I took earlier! I was walking by the river taking pics for a website I'll be designing next week - I needed textures to work into an intro page so I got shots of moss, bark, stone and carpets of old autumn leaves. I was at the same spot yesterday, munching on a flapjack from these lovely people, and this little critter started hopping around my feet, pecking up the crumbs I threw him/her. I was hoping to see the little fluffball again today and, lo and behold, s/he posed beautifully.

See You Next Tuesday

2010-02-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

The organisers of the above event, organised in collaboration with Eve Ensler's V-Day, had a bit of a panic on when they were left without a graphic designer a week before their programme was due to go to press. Yours truly duly stepped into the breach and made them something rather nice.

It's a concertina programme/flyer that folds down to A7 (half a postcard). My brief was that it should be dramatic, colourful and generally "badass" - and that was pretty much it - I had a free rein.

I had to come up with a design that I could put together quickly and that would be coherent and vibrant. I was supplied with some awesome images including the above portrait taken by the very talented Emma Jane Richards, and, using a couple of strong typefaces, the colours orange, turquoise and gold, and a bitmap halftone pattern (those would be those dotty things in the background of the headline in the above), I got going. I used the panels of the concertina to differentiate between events while still making it feel like a big happy family of shows.

One side of the flyer was pretty much taken up with a group of shows organised by Funny Women so I wanted these to feel slightly different but still part of the whole. Hence, still the coloured panels, same typefaces etc but a slightly different header style...

And the most important event of all, the performance of the world-famous Vagina Monologues, would go on the back of the flyer when folded. That was the play that started the whole V-Day thing off - a day to promote the end of violence against women - and is, I guess, the proud parent of this whole festival.

The beneficiaries of the festival are the women of the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, specifically, the women of the City of Joy camp - a place for female victims of violence to recover, physically and psychologically, from their experiences; a place for them to become empowered with the ability to help others in that situation.

Naturally I am proud to have been associated with this heart-wrenching cause - if you can get to see some of the fantastic events at the New Player's Theatre please do.

Jurassic Lark

2010-01-28T02:22:00.000-08:00

This here little blog is, today, about some dinosaur illustrations I was commissioned to create by the National Museum of Wales Cardiff. The Museum presents a sound workshop for young children about the sounds dinosaurs made, centred around the story of a nervous young Apatosaurus "Albie the Adventurer". Albie is a big scaredy-cat - afraid that all the noises in his jungle are T-Rex out to eat him up. His mother gets a little tired of this and so takes him on a journey to show him what a magical place their Jurassic jungle is. While the story is being told the children get to make all the relevant noises - the roars of the T-Rex and the trumpeting of the parasaurolophus. It sounds pretty exciting for a four-year-old!

It's safe to say that this work has been the most fun thing ever. I started by purging Canton Library of their books on prehistoric life, and studied the dinosaurs to be represented in detail, trying not to waste too much time getting drawn in to reading the books (did you know Sir David Attenborough has a pleiosaur named for him?). I then simplefied them into cartoons, retaining a realistic feel in the way they stood and moved. I drew each of the eleven parts of the story in pencil on A3 sheets, then traced over with brush and indian ink. I scanned the inkings into my mac and added all sorts of textures - fabric, bark, cardboard - and shopped in backgrounds from the Museum's own dinosaur gallery. I then added colour, and text in both Welsh and English (he's also Arwyn yr Anturiwr in case you were wondering). They have been approved without amendment, and Grace at the Museum is planning to have a t-shirt made up with one of the illustrations for when she presents the show!

Anyhow, hope you like my dinos - any feedback would be much appreciated.

There was a young man from Nantucket...

2010-01-27T03:16:00.000-08:00

I interrupt this general work-related blog to post this, because it's funny and that. Email received this morning, and my reply:

Dear Mrs Duffy,
In the following e-mail I want to ask for your help. I am an IB student at Pangbourne College and I have the exercise to present some of your poems. I decided to work out in what way Mrs Midas is the key poem for the whole collection "the world's wife". Could you probably be so nice and help me with this exercise, because it is very important for my grades in english. I think it is very helpful if I had the opinion of the author. I hope you find time to help me.
With best wishes

Constantin D

Dear Constantin,

I am not the poet Carol Ann Duffy, but a graphic designer. And if you do manage to contact her, I think you’ll find her title, like mine, will be Ms and not Mrs.

Good luck with your studies,

Caroline

Actual LOL there at some guy asking the POET to help write his essay for him. It's very important for his grades.

Rawwrrrr!

2010-01-06T09:01:00.000-08:00

I've just been commissioned by Grace Todd of the National Museum of Wales to create illustrations for a children's workshop she and her colleagues present for schools on the subject of dinosaurs. How exciting is that?

DINOSAURS!

Sorry, just had to say it again.

I am very excited about this! (does it show?) I'll have the illustrations done by the end of the month, so watch this space and I'll put them up. Or alternatively just pretend to be a small child and smuggle yourself into the workshop.

I hadn't been around the museum for a few years and it's well worth a visit. I had a quick look around the natural history bit with Grace & marveled at the size of the albatross (I mean, I knew they were big, but srsly, they're HUGE), the gazelle (tiny, like an über-femme goat) the bizarre moths and butterflies and the incredible crystal formations. They've got a good dinosaur bit too with lots of skeletons so I'm going to go in there with a camera and take some pics of the sets for a backdrop to the story I'm illustrating.

Awesome work - thanks Grace!

CIO Connect Winter 2009 magazine

2010-01-04T09:02:00.000-08:00

And a happy new decade to you, and all that malarky.

Just before 2009 curled up in its hibernaculum and left us all ensconced in snow, CIO Connect magazine went to press. It's a job I've had pretty much since I edged out on my own as a nervous yet optimistic newbie freelancer, and it's helped my develop my style as much as I've developed the magazine.

One thing that struck me as I saved these pages for the blog is how vital good photography is for a professional-looking magazine. The design can be as fancy-pants as you like but if your images are small, fuzzy, low-res and dark you may as well be the village newsletter. I've met with a few people considering setting up magazines and it seems to be something that, on the whole, they don't regard as important, and resent spending money on.

This is a mistake, and a fundamental one. I may be shooting myself in the foot here, but my opinion is that for the most part, bad photography will let your publication down worse than bad design. Sure, someone with no concept of design will struggle to maximise the impact of good photography, and a good designer will take the same photography and make it sing from the rooftops, but it's very difficult to do anything at all with bad photography.

This, heavens be praised, is something that the people at CIO Connect appreciate, and always have done. They tend to use Martin Burton, who is just bloody ace, and a consummate professional to boot. His skill makes it easier for me to have fun with the layout and means the magazine is a whole lot more pleasurable to work on.

Adventures in the Bush

2009-12-17T09:52:00.000-08:00

The superlative Debi Withers asked me to illustrate the cover for her forthcoming book. She wrote her doctoral thesis about the music of Kate Bush, exploring and deconstructing the avant-garde artist's work in fascinating detail.

Doctoral theses, with the best will in the world, are not often the most readable of texts. With this in mind, Withers has re-written her opus with the music-loving general public in mind. The book is designed as a creative theoretical narrative that tells a story. She says:

"I want Bush’s music to come alive in an experimental fashion but retain a focus on how it exists at the interrelation of popular culture, theory, art, the avant-garde, history and philosophy. I also want to demonstrate how sexuality, gender, power, race, class and spirituality shape her work. My desire is to move away from conventional uses of theory that are often found within academic writing. I want an adventure."

I've read the first three chapters of the book and it's awesome - I'm proud to be associated with it and can't wait to see a hard copy.

Withers asked only that I took inspiration from her text for the cover. It became clear that Bush of the book is a flowing, twisting, natural creature, unboundaried, powerful, elegant. I visualised the words of the cover - strong, clean, clear - and saw ivy creeping out, around, everywhere; filling the spaces between things and connecting everything to everything else. I drew bugs and birds, flowers, mammals, strange symbols that came to mind. It was black on white at first draft; I showed it to Withers and she asked that I invert it and add some red and green. I did this and was amazed at the result - often a small suggestion from someone else - something you would never have thought of - can completely transform your work.

The book is due to be published in March 2010, and you will be able to buy your copy here.

Brave New World

2009-12-17T09:13:00.000-08:00

I'm still catching up with putting work on here that I've done in the past couple of months. I started this blog as it's a lot less faffy than updating the Flash portfolio on my website but sometimes I'm too busy even to do this. And don't even ask me when I last went surfing. I might cry.

Any how, enough of tears and back to joy, as in November the lovely Wil at CIO Connect asked me to design the brochure again for their annual conference. He'd picked out an iStock image and a typeface and asked me to come up with a design based around them, and here's what happened...

Autumn Pulse

2009-12-16T06:36:00.000-08:00

Pulse is the name of my favourite shop in Cardiff - go in there and buy organic raw chocolate truffles and Fentiman's ginger beer and practise your Welsh on them - and also of a (IMHO) toecurlingly-dire gay nightclub - just... well, I warned you.

It's also the name of a fledgling publication put out by the IISP. Steve Newton of Galatea got in touch last year and asked me if I'd be interested in working with him on a potential project, and having worked with him as designer/illustrator on a magazine that he edited, I was happy to. It's midway between a newsletter and a magazine, and information-heavy, so the design has to be clean and clear and simple. I use black and white for type, a strong grid system and fewer larger images, all of which help with clarity.

The people at IISP like the cover to reflect their corporate ID in some way rather than the more traditional photograph and coverlines, so for this second issue I decided that recreating the arrow in their logo using autumn leaves might work. I collected handfuls of colourful leaves, conkers and pinecones in Bute Park and, on a bright afternoon, photographed them all on a white background in my garden. I arranged these bits and bobs into position and worked a rough, textured background upon which to set them. It worked rather well, and the IISP were happy.

Sometimes, being a designer is a bit Blue Peterish. Those times are good.

Honeyspring

2009-12-16T05:35:00.000-08:00

Kerstin Schmidt approached me in May after another client of mine recommended me to her. She wanted a logo and website for her healing practice, based in the elegant Redland area of Bristol.

Working with Kerstin was an incredible experience, and not like anything I have ever done before. We worked using intuition: I presented ideas to her that felt right, rather than what I thought she wanted to see. She would journey (a kind of meditation) and come back with information for me, and we bounced back and forth like this, not rushing, taking time, until she felt the work was complete. I started with the logo - parts of which are doodle, parts are splashes of water from a knocked-over glass, parts are a rock from my garden - and when this was done, I travelled to Bristol and took many photographs around her apartment and her healing room and then, using other photographs I'd taken from walks around Cardiff, put together a very simple, clean site, with which she was delighted.

She says, "Just to say how much I have appreciated your design work on my website. It was brilliant throughout. I especially want to honour your creativity, your commitment, your willingness to keep working and absolutely go the distance no matter what. I’ll be very happy to recommend you to my colleagues wholeheartedly. You are so meant to do work like this."

...which, of course, I'm chuffed to bits with.

Yuletide ponderings

2009-12-16T05:07:00.000-08:00

and breeeeeeeathe

It has been two months since my last confession. The world withdraws and retreats from the grey and the cold and the sun skims the southern horizon, seemingly setting as soon as it has risen. The birds chirp at each other, gorging on the seeds and suet balls, but they seem very far away. I sit, ensconced in blankets and cat hair, green tea in hand, and reflect on the year. Flipping back through my diary is a shocking reminder of how hard I've worked - order from chaos; ideas realised, plans made concrete, doodles to sketches to renderings to printed products on shelves and doormats.

So, without further ado, I post a series of blogs describing the work that I was too busy to upload earlier. Hope you like them and all that.

2009-10-16T08:33:00.000-07:00

CIO Connect Autumn 2009 magazine

2009-10-07T02:42:00.000-07:00

I'm very busy right now so I'll just leave these here - some pages from the latest issue of CIO Connect, the magazine for top IT people. I'm also currently working on a conference brochure for them and will soon begin creating an illustration for the cover of their annual member survey, as well as the interior layout. I've worked with CIO Connect right from the start of my freelance career and really appreciate how they've allowed me to develop my style over the years. Lovely people!

Grrr

2009-10-05T07:35:00.000-07:00

Even as I type this, I'm umming and ahhing as to whether this is wise. Surely a blog that's linked to my work website should be all sweetness and light – here! look at the lovely work I've done! how wonderful my clients are! how great this job is! But as any fool know, it ain't all like that.

Graphic design is regarded as one of those 'cool' jobs. I don't know if it is, but I do know that the skills required are a balanced marriage of creativity and geekdom. Drawing pretty pictures is all very well but an ability to grasp software quickly and fix the occasional hardware breakdown, a thorough knowledge of art and design history, an intuitive understanding of how to play to various audience demographics and a practical grounding in print processes and the limits of what is possible are all vital, too. When you're freelance, you can add reasonable people skills, discipline and opportunism to that list too.

It's also one of those industries where, on the most part, people charge for their time. Macs and software must be purchased, electricity bills paid, but in comparison to other industries, overheads are fairly low - especially for those of us who work from home.

Because of this, some potential clients seem to think that you should 'do them a favour' and slash your prices. I wonder if a builder gave them a quote for a wall that was £1500, would they turn around and say, I'm sure you could do it for £300 if you really thought about it. They don't consider the time spent amassing skills, developing styles, the time spent sitting and thinking and problem solving, and they certainly don't seem to understand that I have a mortgage to pay. It's akin to moaning about the rates that lawyers charge for sending a letter, without taking into account the years of training, abilities and expenses incurred. Lawyers, like graphic designers, solve specialised problems, and although my rates are nowhere near that of a lawyer (and my abilities at warping the truth are, to be frank, abysmal), the principles are the same.

What's prompted these thoughts is a phone-call from a one-off client. I created a cheap flyer for him in January on the understanding (but not the promise with contract – a lesson I have learned) that there would be more work in the shape of a website and a brochure. I had quoted him a page rate for a brochure and agreed to charge the same for this flyer, even though it would take me longer.

After creating a beautiful flyer for very little money, he then took an aeon to pay me, and sent me no file copies, which were part of the deal. The brochure and website work never materialised – I didn't hear from him after receiving that cheque, until I received repeated phone calls from him last week asking for the artwork again as he'd lost the disc I sent him. I told him I hadn't archived it (I didn't bother, having no intention of working with him again) and that the recreation of the flyer would cost a lot more this time. He couldn't quite believe it when I said 'no' to offering him the same deal I'd offered him before.

It's a common theme. I have some wonderful clients who have knowledge of marketing and the media and the skills required to do my job, and they know that I quote honestly, I stick to those prices, and on occasion when they ask me if it's possible to reduce a price in some way I'll do my best to do that. I assume – from the fact that they come back again and again – that they consider me good value. In my six years as a freelancer I've only lost two clients, and those were large businesses who grew big enough to employ their own designers in-house. I'm really lucky to have clients I love working with – there is no-one to whom I answer the phone with a heavy heart. But it's those who want the one-off jobs – "I've knocked up this logo in Word – can you make it look nice? I can pay you £25!" – often business start-ups, people with little knowledge of how vital the visual impact of your business is – who seem to think that this is minimum-wage work, and that they are doing you a favour when they ask for the moon on a stick for a fiver. You know that when you email over the quote you won't hear from them again, that you're wasting your time and also, inevitably, dashing their hopes of having a quality brand created for the cost of a KFC family bucket. I'm not heartless: I know what it is to start out on your own without a penny to spare, and often I genuinely want to help. But commonly, when I do hear back from them, their attitude is that I am ripping them off, taking advantage and generally being a scumbag. Such is life, I suppose – you have to shrug and carry on regardless – but it doesn't make a person feel particularly 'cool'.

Savonnerie logo

2009-09-21T05:44:00.000-07:00

Hand-on-heart this was the most difficult and involved piece of work I have ever done and hence the one I love the best. The lovely people at Savonnerie London asked me to help with their rebranding a while back and while we're still working on that the logo is signed off. Logos are generally clean and simple so what on earth possessed me to go the other way?

Savonnerie London is a luxury soap company with a shabby-chic French rococo feel. Its products are hand-made from 100% natural ingredients and attention to detail is superb. I thought the logo should reflect this. This logo works because the area around the text is clean, so even when the logo is used very small, the text is still legible and the overall feel of the detail is still present. The details reflect the natural products - there are deer, ladybirds, bees, shells and a butterfly interspersed with ivy and oak leaves.

The style of the logo is that of an engraving, so the shadows are made of cross-hatched lines. The logo had to work from very small to very big, which meant creating it in Adobe Illustrator. I started off presenting the idea as a real rough, by copying and pasting bits of rococo art together to give the clients an idea of where I was headed. Looking back at this I can't quite believe they had such faith in me to let me carry on with my fanciful ideas, but I'm glad they did.

After this, I began the pencil sketching. This took maybe three or four goes of drawing and rubbing out bits; here is an early drawing:

Once the pencil sketch was approved I commence the inking - the old fashioned way, with a dip-pen and indian ink:

... and then finally I scanned this in, and traced it, every single cross-hatched line of it, in Illustrator. It was worth every late night sat at my desk - I get a warm glow every time I look at it. It's a wonderful thing when you get pretty much a free-rein from a client to create something really special. It's what the job's all about, I guess.

Photos

2009-09-16T07:54:00.000-07:00

Here are some photos that I took around Cardiff over the weekend, mostly in Bute Park.

Dwy'n dechrau dysgu Cymraeg eto!

2009-09-08T06:20:00.000-07:00

Apologies for any mistakes in the above. I haven't learned Welsh since GCSE and 10 years of living in England mean I can barely say bore da. So what I'm trying to say is that I'm starting to learn Welsh again! I signed up for Cardiff University's Wlpan course, which is two hours two evenings a week, and by the end of the year you're fluent (and I have friends who've done this course, English friends to boot with no prior knowledge of the language, who are now fluent, so this is a sort of cast-iron guarantee).

Although I'd be just fine designing and laying out copy in the language at the moment (hey, I've laid out perfectly well in German, French and Russian and no polyglot am I, I can assure you), I'm looking forward to being able to offer clients a full Welsh-language service. And also nosing in on people's conversations on the train, obviously...

NHS posters

2009-09-08T06:14:00.001-07:00

Viva Media asked me to design a poster template for their client, Caerphilly Local Health Board. They wanted six different A1 posters, differentiated by colour, celebrating their recent achievements for an event involving the Welsh Assembly that's scheduled for 9th September. They supplied copy and images and I did the rest. The above is my favourite of the six.

CIO Connect Summer 2009 edition

2009-07-16T10:17:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest issue of CIO Connect, on the theme of sustainability. The cover feature was shot in quite an urban setting but I wanted to convey the 'green' theme, so I created lots of little motifs of flowers and insects to run throughout the spread. They seemed too clean, and a little prissy, so I printed them out, rubbed away areas with a putty rubber before the ink-jet ink had fully dried, scrunched them up, ironed them out and then scanned the now rather wrecked scraps of paper back in. It's what gives a rather dirty, worn effect to the illustrations. I did the same with the headlines, and also the large arrow graphics on the leadership spread. I guess it's difficult to see using these low-resolution pics but I hope you get the idea.

Photoshop is great, but sometimes real-life does filters better.

I used to sell cat paintings on ebay

2009-07-01T14:43:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm aware that if you have a blog you need to keep it updated with regular news. Trouble is that at the moment I'm in the middle of a few projects and won't have anything to report for a while, so I thought I'd upload a few of the paintings I used to do when I was starting out as a freelancer. Money was tight so I created a few stylised cat designs and painted variations on themes. I'd put them up for auction on ebay, usually a few at a time. They were pretty popular, selling all over the world - I had a fan in Japan who bought ten - and one painting went for around £300 I think.

I'd pretty much forgotten about them until earlier when I was searching through some old files and there they were. I guess I don't have much to say about them other than I love their simplicity and how they have some essence of cat about them.

Hugging trees

2009-06-15T07:15:00.000-07:00

I love trees. I have one in my back garden: she grows apples and her name is Freya. And from now on I'll be loving lots of trees at once (in an entirely polyamorous, consensual way) because I'm going to give 5% of my profits to The Woodland Trust. My prices will stay exactly the same. It's a small way of giving back - although my opinion on carbon offset schemes is that they offset guilt rather than greenhouse gases, preserving our woodlands is vital, and I'm delighted to be a (tiny) part of this process. I'll also be looking to spend one day a month doing volunteer work for local environmental projects once the pollen count has dipped below defcon 1... watch this space!

Giant ants the size of foals

2009-06-12T07:39:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'm not going to say too much about this one - just that I'm massively happy with it and the pic doesn't do it justice. Yes, those are giant ants, on an island, and the further up the island you go the more the ants become part of everything else. It's an illustration for a forthcoming book and there will be 32 more.

I've never painted an illustration before - it's a real luxury and I'm loving it. I've also been commissioned to create a painting for a massage-therapist friend - one he can put in his therapy room. I love my work!

Savonnerie

2009-06-08T03:28:00.000-07:00

Last week the luxury toiletries company Savonnerie commissioned me to help them rebrand their company. I'll be looking at every aspect of their marketing, from logos to packaging to illustrations to website to advertising.

It's a fantastic job and I'm very excited about it. Projects like this are rare gems - the owners want a highly creative, original, decadent style, they want to apply that style across a wide range of materials, and they have strong ethical principles that are in step with my own. I've turned down work in the past because I didn't agree with business practices, so it's great to be working on something that I can get really passionate about.

Plus (and for the record, I'm not the sort of person that normally gets excited about toiletries) - their products are AWESOME.

Gone surfing

2009-06-02T03:42:00.000-07:00

One of the many good things about being freelance is the hours. Sometimes I'll have a week with very little on; sometimes I'll be working all hours. It's not constant, which is great, as those three little words 'nine' 'to' and 'five' fill me with a visceral dread only equalled by the prospect of being made to watch back-to-back soap operas at my parents' house. I have more time to do more of the things I like, and when I'm doing the things I like I tend to be thinking about stuff I'm working on and how I can make it better.

So in a sense, when people find out I work from home and ask me how I manage to switch off at the end of the day, the answer is that I never really do. This isn't a bad thing - if you love what you do, you don't view it as a 'job' but as something that challenges, pushes, inspires you - it's part of who you are. I went to see David Carson talk in London last year and he said that the perfect occupation is something you would choose to do even if you didn't need the money. I'm not saying that I want to spend even more of my time sat in front of my Mac, but the thing is, my best ideas are the ones that come to me when I'm not sat in front of my Mac.

The things I like to do to get ideas include gardening, painting, doodling, yoga and, most of all, surfing. The thing I don't like about doing the things I like is that when I get caught out doing them by clients, I feel a bit guilty. Which is stupid, because if I'm doing these things while I'm supposed to be sat in front of my Mac doing work for them, chances are I'm actually processing the problems and challenges raised by their brief, and coming up with creative ways around them.

I guess the guilt stems from when I worked in a design agency in Cambridge. We had this enormous fish tank, and when I was stuck for ideas I would sit in front of it and watch the clown loaches snuffle the gravel around or the plecostomus moodily swish the smaller fish out of his way. My boss (who was generally a Nice Person) would get a bit irritated by this. He seemed to think that I was skiving on his time. If we had a lot of work on and I went for a long walk and lay under an oak tree in my lunch hour instead dropping sandwich crumbs on my keyboard and cursing at Quark (for lo and behold children, back in those days of yore we did indeed use Quark), upon my return I'd get this Look, a Look that accused me of Not Taking The Work Seriously. In fact, I just needed to shift into a different gear - the gear that lets the ideas in.

It's a difficult process to put into words but it goes a little like this. You stop thinking with your head. Your focus shifts down, you breathe slowly and deeply: you think with your heart. Your brain sinks into the back of your head and your vision becomes peripheral: you do not focus on one thing but instead you see all. You forget yourself in the grander scheme of things: the goldfinch picks seeds from the bird-feeder hanging from the apple tree or the sunlight dances on the glassy sea as you paddle for a wave or the random melding of colours on the paint palette become something more...

You can't think up ideas. They just come.

Captain America!

2009-05-19T13:04:00.000-07:00

In the midst of winter I received a call from a potential client who had a new product that he wanted a complete look for. This thing was some sort of craft invention that was aimed at children and schools but that adults could enjoy, too. He'd had interest from big toy sellers including Hamleys and John Lewis, so the product needed to look absolutely stunning. I was to create a cartoon character - a superhero - and to design all the packaging in the style of a classic comic book, create a comic strip and a website.

An amazing brief, and as with all things that seem too good to be true, it was. Alarm bells sounded when the client kept adding more work to the brief without wanting to address the financial implications, and he became very sheepish when I sent him a quote with a full breakdown of costs even though I'd explained them to him from the start. So I held back on the project until I had full confirmation from him, and only did a few sketches. After a meeting with his bank, he realised he didn't have the money. The job was cancelled only a week after it started.

It is irksome; although some people appreciate how much care and consideration you put into each job, others seem to think you can churn out work like some sort of McProduction Line.

Hey ho: every cloud has a silver lining, etc. I got to spend a few days curled up beside my log fire learning how to draw superheroes while the song of the silent snow played softly outside. It's something they don't teach you in art college - you do a lot of life drawing and anatomy, so you know the lie of the human muscoloskelature, but superheroes are something else entirely. They're massively exaggerated, with dramatic perspective and little drawing tricks that emphasise movement and distance, and subtle crosshatching blending the blackest indian ink with the white of the page. Lucky for me, one of my best friends is a comic book geek and lent me a great how-to book by John Buscema of Marvel comics, so I set to work learning from one of the greatest artists of the genre.

Flipping through my sketchbook earlier, I saw the above inking. When the job was cancelled I was annoyed at having wasted my time, but looking back I appreciate having had the opportunity to diversify my skills. Such is life, I guess.

Charitylog logo

2009-05-05T03:43:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago I was approached by a client with whom I've worked occasionally, pretty much since I started freelancing almost six years ago. I'd done a couple of logos for him and this time he wanted me to look at the logo of one of his clients, Charitylog.

It's a company that has designed software for charities working in the public sector. It provides a log where employees and volunteers can record dealings with clients - for example elderly and disabled people and their carers - so that everything is organised and clear, in one place and most of all, secure.

What's important (to me) is to work out not just what the client wants but what their customers need. So you've got this brand-new cutting-edge software and that's all fine and dandy, but hey, computers and software can be frightening to your perhaps technophobic customers - software can be full of holes, computers can crash and lose data - and if you're a charity paid by the local council to look after vulnerable people you certainly don't want those people's personal details hacked or leaked or lost or whatever. The thing to emphasise, then, is that this particular software is clean, clear and secure. So that's what I did.

I worked on logos that were strong, reassuring, simple and gave the feeling of security. I used motifs like keys, cogs and locks. I used a lot of blue and green - calming colours - and everyday typefaces. This one, the final approved logo, uses Helvetica Black - very common, which is useful because it's recognisable and not new and scary. By putting the type in a black box the logo is contained and feels secure. The round corners soften it a little and the drop shadow (used with caution - these things can look terrible) lifts it. And then there's the little touch of colour with the padlock 'a'.

That's pretty much the thing about being a graphic designer. You can be the most creative person on the planet and produce the most astoundingly beautiful, edgy work, but if it doesn't work for the client and their customers, you're dead in the water.

CIO Connect Magazine

2009-04-14T06:41:00.000-07:00

I've been designing the magazine for top IT people for five years now. In theory this might mean that I'm getting pretty bored and tired with the mag but nope, not at all. This is the second issue with new editor Mark Samuels and he's come up with loads of new ideas which is kind of inspiring, so I've been pushing to make every issue better than the last. Obviously you always have to bear in mind the readership - who they are, what they're expecting. A friend said to me once that I know genre and can work with it - my aim is to give the client exactly what they want and not be all egotistical and stamp my style, whatever that might be, on the publication. All your work ends up looking the same that way. Anyway, here are a few spreads; hope you like them.