by Frank | Aug 23, 2012 | blog news, thoughts, web design
The Simple Grid Responsive wordpress theme design is free from Dessign.net and works equally well on tablets and mobile phones
This weekend I’ll be starting (and maybe even finishing!) a new design for this here (hare, here) website.
I want something a little cleaner, a little clearer, a little better organised. Alright, a lot better organised. I meant to finish this site off with a portfolio page but I never got round to it: as I removed my focus from the site and went back to regular client work I kept sort of forgetting that, y’know, a portfolio page might be A REALLY GOOD IDEA for a designer and illustrator to have. I also want to exploit RSS – something I’ve not bothered with before.
I decided not to bother updating this particular theme as technology has moved on since I designed it. The best websites are now responsive: they adapt to smartphones and tablets and massive desktop displays with equal ease. And there are some BEAUTIFUL ajax and j-query portfolio-ey sites to be had. Here are some of the best blogs I’ve found featuring new responsive free and premium wordpress themes:
https://creatiface.com/freebies/wordpress-responsive-themes
https://www.tripwiremagazine.com/2012/08/wordpress-portfolio-themes.html
https://designtuto.com/25-completely-free-responsive-wordpress-themes/
https://inspirationfeed.com/wordpress/themes-wordpress/40-premium-responsive-portfolio-wordpress-themes/
and a special mention has to be made for über theme designer dessign who creates just the MOST GORGEOUS minimalist themes, many of them free, many of them responsive.
These themes will work straight out of the zip-file for you (and me) but obviously I’mma gonna have me a good fiddle with CSS and what-not to make the theme completely unique. Why not start from scratch, you might ask? Well, the issue here is time. And I’m not very patient. I have never claimed to be a web developer – I have always been quite clear that what I do is I take a good solid free wordpress theme and hack it to bits until it looks how I want it to. This very website, and this one, and this one, and this one, and yes this one too, are all developed from the same favourite theme, believe it or not. I just use it as an interior decorator might use a building – I move some of the walls around, add a window here and there, change the colours and the wallpaper and the furniture and BISH BOSH a new website is born.
So that’s what I’m going to do here.
The other thing is that full-time web developers have invested a lot of time in learning complex code – php, j-query, ajax, html5, javascript etc. I, on the other hand, am mostly a print designer and illustrator and thus have spent most of my time learning Indesign and Photoshop and Illustrator and how to draw and paint and suchlike. I *could* learn said languages (I’m pretty handy with a bit of CSS, the code that prettifies WordPress, obviously) but I’d only use them rarely, and thus, my brain working as it does in that it only stores info that it’s using, that info would be flushed out of my head faster than you can say MySql.
The only thing that troubles me is the ethics of not designing your own website from scratch. That’s why I’m always completely open about the way I work – and how the the way I work makes things quicker and therefore cheaper for my clients. Obviously, in the footers of my web designs I credit the original theme design, but this time I’ll be going a little further and donating some money to the theme creator to thank them for all that time and effort and brain-mushing code-learning they’ve saved me.
It seems like the right thing to do.
by Frank | Aug 22, 2012 | graphic design
I’ve been going through recent work to flag up the stuff I haven’t blogged about yet, and I remembered how much I like this very simple square postcard for the Clore Discovery Centre in National Museum Cardiff. They’ve got this lovely display case at the entrance, upon which usually sits the skeleton of famous Cardiff resident Billy the Seal. We had a nice photo of said display and I suggested making that the cover of the postcard, and making the postcard square to echo the square cabinets. I had to photoshop it a little to get the edges of the cabinet square – the camera lens had distorted them a little – but once that was done the rest of the design was simple.
by Frank | Aug 15, 2012 | CIO Connect, graphic design, illustration, magazine design, slider
As I write, it’s raining. Plus ça change. But that doesn’t stop there being a fabulous new issue of CIO Connect magazine out! Hooray!
I designed it from front to back, and this issue, like the last one, I was asked to create some illustrations. Here are some of the purty pages for your eyes’ happiness!
by Frank | Jul 9, 2012 | graphic design, illustration
My man is a very talented singer and guitarist and he performs with a Hereford-based band called First Season. They asked me to illustrate/design the cover for their EP and I thought I’d share it with y’all. You can listen to a couple of tracks off the EP on soundcloud here. They’re working on their first album and from what I’ve heard it’s even better.
Meanwhile, here’s the cover what I did. Tom and Dave gave me a brief about a man drunkenly putting up his fists to a wind-blown tree, so that’s what they got. The image was indian inked with a brush, scanned into Photoshop, given the cardboard background and a sort of wood-cut texture. The typeface is Adobe Caslon Antiqua.
Cover of First Season’s “Break my boughs burn my leaves”
by Frank | Jul 4, 2012 | graphic design, web design
Palma Mule got in contact with me to ask if I’d help her with a website. She’d recently decided to set up her own counselling service in Bath and wanted a site that would reflect her professionalism but also her way of working – she helps clients work with the feelings and traumas of their lives by encouraging them to express themselves creatively. She’s a very warm, gentle person and I wanted to communicate this, too, for obvious reasons.
She had some really strong ideas about how the logo and the site would look and it was great to work with someone who had such determination to realise their vision. We quickly came up with this little site, which we both feel is warm and welcoming and professional without being clinical. Hope you like it, too!
by Frank | Jul 3, 2012 | CIO Connect, graphic design, illustration, magazine design
is it really three sweet months since I have blogged? *slaps wrists* See the thing is that I know one should blog like maybe twice a week but sometimes life gets in the way a bit and I’m easily distracted and OOH LOOK KITTENS ON THE INTERNET
So, I’m going to try and update you with some of the work I’ve been doing lately. For starters, here’s the most recent issue of CIO Connect magazine. Lovely editor Mark Samuels has asked me to do a bit more illustration for the publication. You can see sections of illustrations for the up-and-coming Autumn issue on my Facebook page now (just to tease you). I’ve been able to take a bit more time with those ones; I had very little time to do the illustrations below – I like them, but I think the ones for next issue are a bit better developed!
Click on any image for a bigger view.
by Frank | Mar 28, 2012 | branding, CIO Connect, graphic design, illustration
CIO Connect has been a loyal client since 2003 and I’ve been designing the branding for their annual conference for top IT types for, hmm, three or four years now. Looking back on the way we came to this year’s final image, I thought it might be a great illustration of how I work together with my clients to create an image that works.
This October’s conference theme is “Embracing the Unexpected”; so late last year (they are organised types at CIO C) they asked me to come up with some ideas around the theme.
I came up with the following rough ideas:
CIO Connect said that they liked the Jackalope (being a ferocious antlered version of a rabbit) coming out of the magician’s hat, but they thought it might not be obvious enough. Perhaps something more overtly ferocious might work? So I created some rough inkings of crocodiles (text was to go across the black arm of the magician). At first I struggled with the idea of what the magician was to grasp, & so gave the croc some bunny ears. Then the jaw-holding idea came to me. I sent both ideas to the client, despite thinking the latter a lot stronger. Normally I wouldn’t do this (David Carson said once never to show the client something you don’t like as that’s what they’ll choose) but I trusted the people at CIO C to pick the better one – and also, sometimes great ideas are born from humble beginnings. Thus:
We like the second one, they said. Can you develop it?
Well, I redrew and I inked and I scanned and I coloured and dear reader, I made this, the final design, with lettering and brand colours:
The response: “I love it!! …thank you so much it’s fab and so different from our usual!”
by Frank | Mar 21, 2012 | web design
Just a quick little post to show y’all a website that’s recently gone live. I designed the wordpress theme and the client can upload all text and images himself. Tis located here on the internets: https://www.dylans.com/
by Frank | Feb 15, 2012 | doodles, illustration
warning: contains naked people!
Hello! Just a quick post to put up some quick sketches I did at the life drawing sessions I’ve been attending at Rodney Parade in Newport for the past couple of weeks. I really recommend life drawing as a fantastic way to improve your drawing skills – if you go regularly you’ll notice an improvement very quickly. If you’re interested in attending these sessions, which are run in Newport on Wednesday mornings and Garth Olwg in Trefforest in the evenings, join this here Facebook group. My friend, awesome painter Carl Chapple, also hosts taught life drawing sessions in Barry on occasional Sundays. He has a Facebook group here which you may “like” to find out more.
Happy scribblings!
by Frank | Feb 1, 2012 | thoughts
So in Part One of this thrilling account of my professional life, we saw our hero (me) leave the safe harbour of an agency job in Cambridge and sail off into the sunset in the general direction of freelancing and Cheltenham. But we should probably scoot back a bit and find a bit more about the reasons why all this happened.
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.
