Necessity being the mother of invention

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.

Tactical necessities and calculated risks

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.

Cold-calling, selling yourself and other horrors

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.

Fields of clover and the sun on your face and other metaphors for success

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.

NB this piece was originally published on my blogger site and I thought it too good to leave it languishing there. Hope you agree, o wondrous readers.

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.

Achieving the perfect website copy can be like catching a mythical beast. Editing copy can be like being perched under a horse's arse. I did this illustration recently and I'm going to shoehorn it in this post, dammit, no matter how awkward it looks

(or, the difficulties of editing copy)

You know the bloated corpses they sometimes find floating in rivers? Well, that’s how I felt about the writing on my website. Disgusting to look at, unwieldy, past its sell-by date. I’d composed it in a fit of verbosity some time ago and knew it needed editing, but every time I thought about dealing with it my stomach turned and my gag reflex kicked in.

It started to haunt me, like in a B-movie (only one about website copy). I’d be washing the dishes and its putrid face would float up at me through the suds. I’d discover its festering limbs emerging from old boxes in the attic. In short, it became my nemesis. So, the other night, in a fit of spring-cleaning fury, I hacked at it until I could see its bones. There’s still flab to slash, but I feel I’m closer to the essence.

It’s easy to see when your writing has become a little monstrous, yet, as every Dr Frankenstein knows, it’s much more difficult to tame the beast than it is to create it in the first place. Where to start?

What you should be talking about

There’s a balance to be struck between describing in dirge-like detail and painting with too broad a brush. “WIN AT SUCCESS”-type books will tell you to SELL THE BENEFITS of your product or service, so in theory I should be rabbiting on about clearer communication, engaged audiences, and little else.

However, in my experience, there is a mist of mystery surrounding what exactly us designers actually do, and, as I like to think of myself as a friendly, helpful soul, I consider it appropriate to explain the process a little, if only to illustrate my friendly helpfulness. There are a bazillion designers out there, and people tell me that they work with me because they like working with me, so by showing my friendly helpfulness I sort of am selling the benefits of my service. Perhaps you might consider getting your personality to come across a little more in your copy. After all, people like to deal with other people rather than faceless corporations.

There’s a dilemma, though: my line of work is visual communication. It could reflect badly if I have to use a lot of words to describe stuff, rather than fancy graphics and that. So, for me it’s important to keep everything as close to the bone as possible without losing my friendly tone. I suspect the same is true of you, because you don’t want to be waffling on. You want people to think you’re efficient and things like that.

So, without further waffling on, here are four rules I’ve been using when re-writing my site:

• the continual repetition of the holy trinity of mantras “is this bit necessary?”, “can it be better written?” and “what does it say about me?”
• finding ways of breaking up pages into smaller chunks (“services” became three pages about print, web and illustration respectively)
• remembering to illustrate the occasional point with a picture
• hacking unwieldy paragraphs into submission with page-prettifying subheads and pull-quotes

The challenge, I find, is to give your audience enough of the right kind of information without boring the shit out of them. It pays to snoop around at competitors’ sites sometimes, though I rarely bother as basically I’m trying to sell myself, so what other people are talking about is frankly irrelevant. I continue to struggle with my testimonials page – I’ve cut swathes away but I want to maintain context as I don’t think a simple sentence like “Caroline isn’t a total arse” is really enough. My clients have taken the time to write some really lovely stuff about me and I want to honour that, but also I don’t want people who read the whole page to be vomiting all over their keyboards. So, there’s more to come. Or, rather, less. When I catch the mythical beast of perfect copy I’ll be sure to let you know.

…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:

Bear with me, you beautiful people x

And it is personal. The thing is this: I’m very flexible, which is usually an advantage for a freelancer. I just go with the flow of whatever my clients request of me. That doesn’t involve too much seizing of the day, however, and I have often been left frustrated at unaccomplished personal projects. So I am in the business of putting a little more day-seizing into my schedule. This is how I will do it:

The plan

Blogging forces me to take a wider view of what I am doing and where I am heading. It lifts me up out of my strange little world of tea and cats and dead moths caught by said cats until I can see them thar hills in the distance. I can also see and be inspired by and share stuff that others have been doing.

Therefore I aim to blog two or three times a week. Sometimes this might be as simple as sharing a photo I’ve taken or a logo I’ve seen; other times I’ll discuss projects I’ve worked on and there’ll be the occasional thinky pondery one too. I’ll publicise the blogs on Twitter and Google+. I’ll also use the latter as a channel to share interesting finds and discover more things I can pass on to you here.

I’ll still use Twitter in both a personal and professional capacity: I view it as a way for potential clients to get to know who I am and what I stand for – and it seems to be working. I’ve gained more new clients from using it in the last six months than from all other sources combined. Plus, I enjoy it, and it costs me around £2,500 less than advertising with Yellow Pages, which has gained me precisely 0 (zero) clients. Thus, I am all about cutting out the waste and focusing on what really works, for me at least:

Good:

• Social media (maybe even Facebook again, gasp)
• blogging
• being flexible & creative with time use (9-5 often dull, with apologies to Ms Parton)
• burning off adrenaline & also thinking at the gym

Bad:

• Routine (a lot of it, anyway. BORING.)
• Doing whatever pops into my head as a priority. Planning good/repetition bad etc
• Trying to fathom the logic and reason behind anything HMRC says and getting stressed by said illogic and unreason (enter shiny new accountant stage left)
• Old forms of advertising and marketing

Thus, I place my pants outside of my tights and become a bit bloody super, instead of all sort of dithery and uh, what next? etc.

Kapow!

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.