Thinking of gifting yourself a fresh new look for the new year? Exciting! Crafting a new brand for your business is a big thrill, and it naturally throws up all kinds of questions about how the whole thing works. Queries and concerns I’ve heard include….

Ready to fly by the seat of your pants and make your own work rules? Yay! As a fully paid-up member of the not-at-all secret society of freelance designers, I can tell you that fewer things are more fun and fulfilling (workwise). The flip side is there’s often something scary lurking in the corner, ready to leap out and knock you off balance. 

And nor should they be. Sure, most of the time freelancing is a solo journey - but having a few pals with complementary skills to ride the rollercoaster with you is no bad thing. 

Oof! The shade of associating the newest design tool kid on the block with the most trolled typeface on the planet. The short answer though, is no. Far from being a shady design option, it's a great app that’s easily accessible and can take the sting out of creating graphics on a budget. BUT! You can easily run amok among the never-ending selection of templates, elements and fonts with disastrous results. Something I see more often than I’d like.

AGE. It happens to all of us. There’s no point running from age — age is faster. More athletic. It has really lean calves.

So, rather than try to outrun the thing, I’m going to take a moment to just reflect on what I will call “30 learnings.” I won’t go so far as to call them “lessons”, because they’re not all very useful, but they are all things that my brain has absorbed over the course of the last 30 years of being alive.

Are they all useful? To me, yes. To you, maybe. Let’s just say my favourite moments writing for this blog are when I get to picture myself as a wise elder passing on pearls of wisdom to an audience of attractive younger people, like when I wrote about the three P’s of Graphic Design. So please, gather round — I have many pearls. Just so, so many pearls.

The stress of starting a business or working for yourself is as real as it gets. It’s like one day you’re at school, surrounded by nice adults who are literally paid to ensure you do not perish (and learn stuff, I guess). Then, the next day you’re suddenly the adult and oh god suddenly you’re the person in charge, except the one who’s paying you is also supposed to be you. So, yeah — it’s stressful.

What’s worse is that “being good at what you do” isn’t even enough any more: now you also have to look the part and present well. So, naturally, you google ‘Branding’ and you’re hit with two options: either you pay someone to take care of this nightmare for you, or you go full DIY and graduate from MS Paint to full-blown Photoshop (with a minor in web design and Illustrator).

Whether you’re the founder of a small business, the man-child owner of a rubbish social media platform, or the brilliant and charismatic mastermind behind a world-class design blog that my mum “sometimes reads,” you won’t get very far without professional branding. And even then, it might not save your rubbish social media site.

I’ve come up with a number of things to look out for when you’re hiring or working with designers. These should help you work out whether you’re dealing with an honest-to-goodness flesh-and-blood human being who you can trust with your brief… or a goblin.

In case you’re not too familiar, briefs are what we call the little dance of social anxiety that graphic designers and prospective clients perform before any real work is done. 

I was lucky enough to meet the organiser, writer, and all-round top Gal Michelle Thomas recently - and she asked me to feature in the latest issue of her magazine, which focuses on ways to work happy.

For future graphic designers, the first step on the road to getting paid for having bothered to learn Photoshop is the most soul crushing one. It’s bad enough that the road is long and steep and very off-puttingly lined with signs promising good money if you’re willing to just step away from it all and start harassing people about their phone contracts in the middle of the day. Then, the very first thing you do is to ask Google whether there are any “graphic design jobs near me” and get told “sure, sure, pretty close — how close to Chengdu did you say you lived again?”.

A Wintery getaway (coinciding with a double birthday, always a treat) seemed fitting for Stockholm - a place I’d meant to visit for years to see a friend. I’ve previously been to Stavanger in Norway (cold, dark), and Copenhagen in Denmark (warmer, also dark) at this time of year, so it seemed fitting to head here, and you might say I had a dream: to go to the ABBA museum and make a tit of myself. I did manage to also fit in some pretty cool places to eat, drink, and snap pics of, so please take this list as ‘here are some things to do (once you’ve finished at ABBA)’. If you’re not interested in ABBA, I am not interested in you.

Having lived off design work for a good few years, I now know there are roughly four main channels designers might find themselves down: Agency, In-House, Film, or Freelance. In this post, I wanted to briefly introduce what these generally look like, and via internet-friendly bullet points, impart some idea of what it’s like to work at each (because I have, and I have thoughts about it).

Like anyone who has ever dipped their toe in the shallow waters of a new career, hoping they might cross the riverbed of ‘confidently knowing stuff’ to the green banks of ‘consistent adult employment’, only to find that their toe has been ripped clean off by what was in fact a raging, not-at-all shallow and in fact quite aggressive, piranha-infested river — there’s something about underestimating the difficulty of something and having your toe bit off that makes you question how you got to be so confident on the topic of crossing riverbeds.

A few days in Philly, hunting out the graphic design of the Old City and the best bagels around* (*the best bagels I could find given limited time)

I have learned that to get into graphic design for film, you need to employ a strategy called ‘just being everywhere and keeping busy all of the time until someone eventually hires you/takes pity on you, a weary skeleton.’ And from the outside looking in, it looks like that’s all there is, just endless busybodying, but actually from the other side, there is a mysterious logic to it. It requires some emotional discipline and, contradictorially, some ‘prior knowledge’ of a job you have not done before to make it make sense, but I’m going to talk about that stuff in later posts. For now, it’s tip time. Behold, seven tips on getting your start in The Industry.