When I first started out as a designer I was pretty confident. Perhaps even cocky. I already thought I knew a lot, although this was based on very little experience. I’d designed some posters and record sleeves and spent hours pouring over old IDEA magazines (If i ever win the lottery I’ll immediately acquire the entire back catalogue) featuring the likes of Tomato, ME company, the Designers Republic and all the other go-to agencies of the late nineties / early noughties. I wasn’t a complete nuisance though, I was receptive to learning new skills, it’s just that I also had…
The power of a successful brand cannot be underestimated. You may think of your brand as being your logo or a marketing campaign but it’s so much more than just a ‘look’ for your company. It’s an expression of your unique, seductive offer.
Branding your startup business is a crucial step in the timeline of your company, but for most, making an informed decision to invest in anything at all in business can be hard.
Here we’ll explain what we mean by ‘branding’ and why investing in it should be important to you.
What do we mean by ‘branding’.
The essence of your company, product or…
Working for yourself… with others.
When I became self employed in 2008 I had no idea what to expect. I had some distinctions that I wanted to make about the way I worked and some personal rules, but I had no real ‘plan’.
“We never had a plan so nothing could go wrong”
Why Not Associates
I felt I was a good designer and communicator and I had a passion and a philosophy which I was pretty confident I could make work. But still, I wasn’t entirely sure how things would turn out. …
Why Studio Contents?
If you’ve already read Inspiration, collaboration and participation, my post on the inception of Studio Contents and the thinking behind it you might be wondering about the name and why it was chosen.
The idea of collaboration is a driving force behind ‘Studio Contents’ and so it was important to communicate that in the name.
Whilst the whole is generally considered greater than the sum of it’s parts, it is, nevertheless, the sum of it’s parts and the same can be said of any project that we work on as creatives. It is inevitably the final output, the work that…
(Yes, it’s a Star Trek reference in a post about design)
My dad recently had a triple heart bypass. Not a pleasant experience, but he is recovering rapidly and is now pretty much back to full fitness again, perhaps even slightly cheerier and envigorated. What interested me is a conversation he had with his surgeon before having the operation. It also, strangely, put me in mind of John Naughton's article for the The New Review section of the Observer—'Graphic Designers are ruining the web'—but I'll get to this later.
A few weeks before the operation was due to take place the surgeon invited him to the hospital to discuss the finer…
