Brave New World

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

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

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

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.

CIO Connect Autumn 2009 magazine

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

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'.