Note: there’ll be a part 2 next week about how I successfully became a full-time freelancer :)

thus:

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 and extra advice 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.

I would argue that a good journalism course might actually be better preparation than some of the insipid design degrees I’ve heard about.

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, or 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 and 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’ writ large upon them (oh that sweet sweet moment!). We took on a talented junior whom I supervised, sort of. And then, after three years, my partner got a job in Gloucester, so we moved to Cheltenham and I went freelance.

That’s it. It’s as unpredictable 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.

CIO Connect magazine cover design

Here’s a quick look at the Winter issue of  CIO Connect. It’s a quarterly magazine for Chief Information Officers (top IT bods to you and me).

Normally the cover feature photos are taken by the talented Mr Martin Burton. Unfortunately this issue the interviewee didn’t have time for a photoshoot so we had to use supplied PR shots which, although passable, were not nearly as beautiful as Martin’s work.

cover feature

Usually we have a couple of features on the same subject that warrant being linked by a design device while still appearing to be part of the magazine as a whole. The background texture, use of road-sign symbols and similar layouts mark the features below as separate from the others, but the fonts, layout grid and page furniture are the same throughout the magazine.

security feature design

...and again

I learn something new from every project I work on and, though I’ve designed CIO Connect magazine for eight years, I’m still trying to up my game & improve on the previous issue. It’s one of the most satisfying parts of the job and I really enjoy it.

…and I was very happy to be asked to design the brochure for Cardiff’s huge annual event. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend this year’s party but have been assured that a fabulous time was had by all.

Peacocktastic

I wanted to create an image for the cover that would scream Mardi Gras without using people. I wanted bright and bold and elegant; I wanted something that would need no translation. Hence this rather dashing bird.

I had the wonderful opportunity to advertise with the brochure, too. Here’s my effort:

The cover star is Sunny Lee of the Hong Kong Jockey Club, so I made a little racehorse for his feature. Neat, huh?

Here are a couple of other spreads from the magazine, including a lovely artwork from illustrator Tony Sigley:

That’s it for now – will be adding a few more bits of work this week, and blogging more fully about my site redesign too.

Frustration comes from expectation. Remove the expectation, you remove the frustration.” - Sister Shelby Hellbound

I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations lately. Not the real, tangible, obvious ones (a client asks me to create a logo for them, I agree, therefore they have an expectation that that’s what I’ll do), but more the sort of hopes-and-dreams-and-pie-in-the-sky-stories we all tell ourselves, and how they can impact on business relationships. A couple of books I’ve had my nose stuck in this week have helped me explore this thorny ground and expose how clear, honest communication from the start is the best solution: one is How to Run a Successful Design Business edited by Shan Preddy; the other is The Surprising Purpose of Anger by Marshall B Rosenberg PhD.

I’ll start with the latter. Rosenberg, founder of the Center for Nonviolent Communication (oh dear, they use Comic Sans in their logo, way to go to make me feel peaceful there), posits that anger is a warning signal: when properly made conscious it is possible to realise that the trigger of and the reason for your anger are separate things – and that the reason for it is always your own judgmental thoughts about the trigger situation. Anger’s warning is an indication that in some way your needs are not being met.

Let’s take an entirely hypothetical situation.

My boyfriend is late meeting me at the cinema and we only just catch the start of the film. This triggers my anger. The reason for my anger is that I have enduring negative thoughts around his lateness being a lack of respect for our time together, and of how much I wanted to see this film and that he was bound to let me down again, and also a general frustration at his lack of ability to get his shit together. Thus, I have insecurities about how much he values the relationship and my unmet need requires him to convince me that he takes the relationship seriously. (Thinking all of this through in the heat of the moment might be difficult, though). In this scenario I need to manage my own expectations (he is always late – relax about it) and communicate to him how his lateness triggers my insecurities – which he could then choose to address.

So what do my entirely hypothetical relationship problems have in common with graphic design, hmmm?

Well, on to Shan Preddy’s book. It is a massive and invaluable resource and every designer and agency should buy it as you will bloody learn something. It’s divided up into lots of little essays by various experts about different aspects of the business. The bit I am reading now is about project management – setting up a process, taking things step-by-step, allowing contingencies, etc. All common sense stuff.

The part that struck me was this: that client and agency expectations for the project should be made clear from the start.

What does this mean?

The client will have expectations – often unspoken – about the agency. They will have made their choice to use the agency based on a myriad of things – the marketing, the initial meeting, the price, the pitch, the mood they’re in, the weather, whatever. So it’s a good idea that I, the agency, ask them about their expectation. Get them down on paper. Make sure that all parties are 100% aware of the job remits and the required outcomes.

I might also have expectations and assumptions – that the client knows what they’re doing and how to work with me on every step of our journey. So, importantly, I should list my own requirements, too: A clear, coherent brief. Honest and timely communication. Prompt payment.

Managing expectations – getting them out of the realm of foggy wishes and ineffable feelings and down on paper – enables both parties to know where they stand and enables everyone’s needs to be met, thus avoiding frustration and even anger. Yep, there’s still room for feelings and intuition and creative design, but obligations on all sides are clearer, allowing for a more secure relationship and providing a solid grounding for the magic to happen.

Plagues of vagueness

I learned this lesson recently with a client who wouldn’t write me a brief, (despite downloading a copy of this) and then became increasingly frustrated with me as I continued to miss the mark. Shan Preddy’s book has some invaluable advice for this sort of situation. What it suggests the designer do in this case is to offer to write your own brief from your client’s woolly instructions, and send it to them for their agreement before proceeding. It also cleverly suggests that you tell them you are charging extra for this service. A reasonable client will realise that their vagueness is giving you a tonne of extra work, and either get their head out of the clouds to construct a brief, or agree to pay you to commit their ramblings to paper-form.

An unreasonable client will cry holy hell – and you can walk away, without having wasted too much time.

I wrote a guide (you may have heard me mention it) to help design-buying newbies write briefs. People say it’s helped them understand how designers work and what we need from clients, but I’ll be going further and firming up my communications to ensure that I and my clients have as much chance as possible of living happily ever after.

Anyhoo, what happened was last summer the National Roman Legion Museum in Caerleon contacted me about a newly-conceived project involving a magazine by young people for young people that would help illustrate parts of Roman history relevant to the lives of teenagers. “We want it to look a bit like Kerrang!,” they said. “No problem,” I said.

The main differences between Kerrang! and this little publication are that a) FYI only has six pages per language (it’s a bilingual flip-and-turn type thing) and b) Kerrang! has an awful lot more information on each page. Luckily we managed to source some interesting photos, and with a little photoshop magic to increase the grunginess I think FYI captures some of the action.

It took a little while for the students to arrange the subjects and copy they wanted including, so the project developed slowly over the months, and finally went to press in March. Many of the images were supplied by the Museum, some I found free on websites like Stock Exchange and some I provided or illustrated myself. Inky and charcoaly lines, lots of textures and halftone patterns and a limited colour palette help roughen the look.

For extra interest, the little mag is 90% of the size of A4 (it’s a good thing to note how much more attractive non-standard-sized publications are to readers) and is beautifully finished on silk stock, thanks to sourcing print via my brilliant independent print sales expert. The Museum emailed me to say that they are really happy with the finished product. Phew!

I was asked by staff in the Learning Department to come up with designs that looked a bit like scrap books, while still retaining the Museum’s branding style. The two booklets – one for the Clore Discovery Centre and one for the newly re-opened art galleries – are thus filled with scanned scraps of paper, post-it notes, paper-clips, sellotape, Polaroid photos and blu-tak.

I used three typefaces on each project – Univers, which is the Museum’s standard typeface, to ensure brand consistency, a rough typewriter font (one that works with the ŵs of the Welsh language, too – hooray!) for highlighted text, and crumpled playful grungy fonts for the headers.

The booklets are Welsh one side and English the other, with a united page in the centre spread that works for both.

I did plenty of fun quick little illustrations for each booklet – starred asterisks, inky boxes, felt-pen trophies and hands pulling shapes. Click on any pic for bigger.

The challenge for this sort of work is two-fold. Firstly, the booklets were to be interesting and engaging and have this rough, curated feel. I was shown examples of other museums’ efforts and asked if I could produce something that didn’t copy them but had the same hand-finished feel. Yet the booklets still had sit within the Museum’s branding and not feel at odds with the rest of their publications. This is achieved with the band at the top of each cover, and with the Museum’s own typeface as body-copy, as mentioned.

Secondly, when presented with a request to create something that feels hand-made and cobbled together, there’s a real risk of a lack of balance. It’s pretty easy to enter the perilous realm of the dog’s breakfast. The thing to do is to establish some rules. I stuck to a rigid three-column grid with 5mm margins. Overall, colours are fairly limited, margins are always adhered to and there is a consistency of inky line all the way through. The post-its are regular little notes to encourage readers to act, and all the pages are given structure with standard headers.

Hope you like these as much as I do!

Yes, I do. It’s possibly my favourite thing to do. It’s all about retaining a united look for the whole publication, but differentiating articles from each other. Tis a fine balance. My general rules of thumb would be:

• choose a few key fonts. I’ve cut down the amount I use for each publication over the years; at present I probably use three font families with CIO Connect magazine, and two with Pulse. Body fonts, header fonts, subheads, captions and general page-furniture should all fit nicely together. Contrast the old with the new; pay attention to the rhythm and shapes of combinations of typefaces.

• restrict the palette of colours used for each article. Echo or juxtapose with the main imagery.

• and while we talk about imagery – the better this is, the better your publication will look. It’s not impossible, but it is time-consuming, frustrating and demoralising to polish a turd. If you’re relying on other people to send photos to you, get them your specs early and remind them often. Request professional photography. Nevertheless, you will be sent blurred dark low-resolution images. It’s a fact of life, like aging and Jimmy Carr.

• never underestimate how much structure – and therefore beauty – one can add with clever page furniture. Page numbers and kickers might seem like dull must-haves but, if done well and used with elegant column and margin proportions, they really lift and frame a page. They are like the eyebrows of the magazine, if you like.

As ever, click on the pics for bigger versions. And if you’d like me to design your magazine to look this good, get in touch!

But all that glitter and gloss costs money. What about the companies that don’t want to spend so much, but still desire a handsome regular publication to share with their members, customers, shareholders or what have you?

Never fear, it can be done. There’s a step up from the self-produced mediocrities begat by Microsoft Publisher, Comic Sans and clip-art. It’s possible to get a rather smart-looking result, using a skilled designer, cheap stock images and custom illustration. I design and illustrate such a publication. I’m not entirely sure if you’d call it a newsletter or a magazine. It’s a 16-page quarterly thingumy. The client supplies stories that their members have written along with thumbnail pics of the authors, an editor edits and collates, I illustrate a cover incorporating the arrow of the client’s logo and a reflection of the subject matters covered or the season we’re in. This season being Spring (and as I type, the sky is obediently blue, the daffodils obediently flashing upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude, and the sparrows obediently chirpy), I done made a nest of arrows and what-not. I have a thing about cardboard backgrounds (have you noticed? You have?) as they lend texture and earthiness to vector-based illustrations which can often be toe-curlingly clean and false. Here’s the cover (click on the image for a bigger version if you like):

The illustration avoids us having to source what could be a very expensive cover photograph, plus it helps give style and character to the thingumy. Inside, I’ve kept everything very clean and clear, devising a layout which is quick and simple for me to lay out, thus saving money:

Stock imagery is often difficult to use without it being a touch cheesy. I try to circumvent this by the use of interesting cropping and wrapping text around. Where possible I don’t choose the obvious image, but of course I am limited to what the image libraries can supply. Keeping everything clean and aligned to a grid adds needed class.

So, there’s a middle ground. It’s possible to get interesting professional magazine design on a budget. It’s a line of work that can be really enjoyable, too. I think what makes Pulse a success is that I’m pretty much left to get on with it – and I find that when clients have that level of trust, designers can really step up to the mark.

I’ve held back posting this story in the dim hope that the matter would be resolved. I’m one of those bouncy eternal-optimist types who believes that every story has a happy ending, etc etc. But it looks like I’m never going to get paid for this job, and as the client is apparently broke, I don’t have the heart to go down the legal route. And I’m so proud of this logo I can’t just leave it on the shelf, gathering dust. I want you to see it!

A woman called me up and asked me to meet her to discuss a possible branding job for a little coffee van she’d bought at great expense. Twas a cute little thing which she could drive around to festivals and markets and what-not, and instead of an urn and a large bucket of Nescafé, within the van was housed a proper Italian coffee maker. She was a dramatic type of person and loved burlesque and the circus, and wanted a fun, family-friendly logo that reflected all this. She’d asked a few designers and agencies to come up with ideas before choosing who to go with, as she didn’t want to get messed around (oh, the irony, huh?

I was confident I could give her a good idea, but didn’t want to waste too much time on something that I wasn’t going to get paid for (ha ha) so I sketched her the rough below and sent her a description of how the final would look in my head.

She loved it, it was exactly what she wanted, and so she commissioned me to go ahead with my idea. She had a lot of fantastic ideas about what she’d also want from me – business cards that would look like a Tarot card, a whole Moulin Rouge-themed coffee shop branding, a chain of coffee shops – and, if I’m honest, alarm bells started to go off. The people who get too far ahead of themselves and are not focused on the very next step they need to take are often the dreamers. It’s one thing to think about the big picture and have an aim, but you can often tell by the way someone talks how grounded their dreams are in reality.

Anyway, I re-drew and firmed up the pencil sketch to her requirements and started to create the illustrator document you see at the top of this blog which would form the outlines of the logo. About the time this stage was coming to completion (the lettering still needs a touch of work), I started to get signs from her that all was not going well financially. I’d invoiced her 50% of the total when the pencil sketch was approved and this was becoming late, despite her repeated assurances that she would pay me “tomorrow”. I felt sorry for her as she was obviously going through a rough time emotionally, but said to her I was concerned I wasn’t going to get paid at all, so invoiced the full amount, which she said she was fine with. I said I would complete the logo as soon as I’d been paid. That was in November 2009. In March 2010, with end of tax year in mind, I emailed her and said if she didn’t pay me by the end of the month I would write off the invoice as a bad debt. She begged for an extension and promised to pay me in July, the time of many outdoor festivals where her van could potentially earn her money. Suffice it to say I never heard from her again.

So here is the logo as imagine it would have looked. The van was painted crimson red, and we planned to have the hand-drawn lettering in gold. It’s a sad story as it’s probably my favourite of all the logos I’ve done, and I was looking forward to seeing it on the side of her little van. Such is life.

The lessons I learned from this experience are thus:

• - I now ask for 30-50% up front from all new clients, depending on the size of the job. All of my regular clients get the usual 30 days’ credit. If someone is serious about me pouring my heart and soul into something for them, they won’t resent this.
• - Proceed with caution when dealing with dreamers. If their heads are in the clouds, check their feet are on the ground, too.
• - If clients start to dawdle and keep delaying the completion of the work, they may well be attempting to delay your invoice.

I’ve been too bloody nice about things in the past, and I suppose it’s a testament to luck that I’ve only been messed around two other times like this in the seven years I’ve been doing this. If I’d been a bit more business-like from the start at least I would have got paid for half of the job. It’s a difficult balance – you don’t want to be seen as too hard-nosed, but on the other hand clients have got to understand I’m not in this job for the benefit of my health, and that I expect them to take the effort I put into their work seriously.

I’d love to hear about how other designers have handled similar situations. Do you insist on money up front? Have you had lawyers draw up a contract for you, or have you had to use them to get money you’ve earned? Feedback welcome!