Grrr

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

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

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

Dwy'n dechrau dysgu Cymraeg eto!

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

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

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

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.