Character illustrations

Peter Bartram has written some rather lovely things about our work together last year for his Colin Crampton books. He asked me to write a few lines about how I created the illustration of Colin’s girlfriend Shirley, and the result was this facebook post:

Peter Bartram Colin Crampton character illustration

You can see the other illustrations I created for Peter at the Colin Crampton website here, and read more about his Brighton-based humorous crime fiction tales too.

Odd (graphic designer) jobs

Four jobs you might not have considered asking a graphic designer to do

As surely as most people get their cars serviced by mechanics and their teeth filled by dentists, probably the first kind of person you’d consider asking to create you a logo or a magazine would be a graphic designer.

However, there are other little jobs we can perform – jobs that make your life easier and your work more impressive, winning you acclaim from colleagues, clients and bosses alike, probably ensuring rapid promotion, pay rises, ability to fly and/or become invisible and maybe even respect from your cat.

These jobs, then:

Professional designed Microsoft Word templates1) Word templates

Your company sells products to other companies and you go into prospective clients and you give them a whole spiel about how your service or product will help them, with figures like the percentages it’s increased profits or reduced waste or gained the respect of cats of other clients. You want to show the clients something snazzily designed with all these facts and figures on it, something to leave with them, with their logo on it and perhaps some of the info changed to suit their industry sector. But if a snazzy designer creates some snazzy template for you to amend yourself they will use strange esoteric expensive software, right, and you don’t have the money to buy that or the time to learn how to use it.

Wrong. I’ve created just such a thing in that bog-standard ol’ carthorse Word for an insurance company. Their prospective clients’ logo is in the footer of a master page so just one change needed for a global result. And of course it’s incredibly easy to change the text here and there and there’s plenty of on-line how-to support.


2) Powerpoint slides

professional designed powerpoint slides

Powerpoint cover slide designed for CIO Connect conference

We all love Powerpoint, don’t we?

We especially love the default template designs, fonts and colours that almost every presentation ever has used.

The easiest, cheapest thing (and most common request) is that I create a slide background for a presentation. I create this in Photoshop, place it in the background of a master slide and voila! a beautifully-branded display. Further to this I can advise on typefaces and colour, create a template for you or I can design the whole presentation entirely – it’s really up to you, your budget, the time you have and your own confidence with the software.

professionally designed powerpoint slides

Slides for sexual consent campaign PausePlayStop


3) Beautiful graphs and charts

beautiful professionally-designed graphs and charts

People with £££ just love to get a designer all over their facts and figures to make a mouthwatering infographic. But for only £, you can get your default Excel-created pie-charts made beautiful, elegant and suited to your branding.


4) Headers for e-newsletters, facebook pages, twitter etc

Header designed for the newsletter of the Diversity Trust

Header designed for the newsletter of the Diversity Trust

These are the sorts of things that have people inventing interesting and demonstrative new swearwords. You might know exactly what you want, but, lacking Photoshop, illustrator and the skills to use said, you end up forswearing all technology and decide to move to a shack deep in the nearest and most convenient dark forest.

It’s okay. I can help!

Other random little jobs I’ve been asked to do:

  • Colour-match products that were photographed at different times so they look the same
  • photoshop-out a dastardly coldsore
  • consult on the most suitable freely-available font for a shop where the owner was going to create most of the signage herself
  • make the sky blue (in photoshop, not real life – my witchcraft skills are not yet that advanced)