How was Pure Graphic Design founded and with what mission?
My freelance career started way back due to me having family and the costs associated with that, my wife working part-time, childcare costs, food, bills, mortgage etc plus my graphic design day job did not earn me enough, so I started up a side business which I ran throughout nearly all my career from about 2005 up until 2020 when I went full-time freelance. I chose ‘pure graphic design’ as a name because that’s all I ever wanted to do, but also in the early days of SEO, having the words ‘graphic’ and design’ in my website URL was a big help. My first job was in 1994 with an advertising agency which was one of a few local agencies I worked at – I’m not based in London, but rather an hour’s train journey away, so I tended to use local agencies due to needing to be around for my growing family. So my freelance career started by working evenings & weekends, this was back in early 2005. I guess my day job was a bit more behind my freelance career in terms of progress, my day job was almost entirely print-based work: brochures, advertising, exhibition graphics, and so on. On the other hand, my freelance career gave me the opportunity to be more experimental, particularly with website design. My first projects were small branding and website designs – I was looking for a method I could create a site and have my clients able to make changes themselves so rather that hard-code I started working with WordPress. This was in the early days when WordPress was still mainly a blogging tool but it was powerful enough even then to create static pages and for me to use theme frameworks from which to build bespoke websites. I learnt very basic PHP but got skilled at CSS, so became good at coding my own designs that did not look like basic templates. My mission was purely to get more work to pay the bills – I had 4 kids so that was motivation enough. I was at a design agency for a long long time based in in Reading, Berkshire and England and I had a brilliant boss. There was four of us all together but me and him were really quite close and worked really well together. I was there for about 15-16 years until we had a disaster back in 2015 where he unfortunately and unexpectedly died on a cycle ride. It was a horrible, chaotic, emotional time which we survived and we carried on for another 4-5 years until I left. I found out 8 months after I left they went bust during COVID. So it was Dec 2019 when I quit my job and decided to go full-time freelance. It was very daunting and I had not built up 3 months’ worth of pay (which if you read any advice blog they all tell you do amass that sort of money). But I had a number of contacts built up over the years of my freelance side hustle, and one of those got me in touch with a top London design agency. So after going to London for an interview, I had my first three months already booked in contracting for them which was a massive boost. They were a top-tier award-winning agency with top people, and I learnt a massive amount in all aspects of brand comms and also how they managed clients. The majority of their work was annual reports, although I was brought in to work on a new branding job they had in. It went from name creation all the way through to designing a fully fledged brand identity. Then COVID hit, and they cut back their freelancers, so suddenly after 3 months, I was on my own. This is where it got tricky but I was good enough and skilled enough to find my own private projects. The best bit of advice on that is to try all avenues, I had a decent contact list built up so I was able to talk to them and get projects or recommendations, but I also tried some of the online platforms such as Upwork and YunoJuno to varying degrees of success. I also talked to a few specialist recruitment agencies in order to try and get more design contact work. I have built up my client base from there and for the last three years, my work has been about 80% private client work and 20% design contracts. My goal for 2025 is the same one I had for 2024 – to switch that around and do try and find more contracting work and ease off on the private work.What services do you offer?
I would say that I am a complete all-rounder. I am highly experienced in all aspects of print design and also digital design. This flexibility and can-do approach has been very beneficial to my freelance career, as when you are working with small private clients they can pretty much ask and want you to do anything and you need the skills to be able to handle that. Also, you need to think about the money side, most private clients have a limited budget so the more you can do yourself, the more profit there is to be made. So from that point of view, my work has been hugely wide and varied, ranging from logo design to brand guidelines, to website design, exhibition design, annual reporting, PPT and keynote presentations, video editing & animation design… the list is endless. My main selling point is you can throw a blank sheet of paper at me, and we can have a chat about your wants & business needs and I would be very confident of delivering what you need for your business, better than your expectations and within your budget. Overall I can split my work into two sections: For my private clients, the services I offer tend to be logo design & website design and some PPT design too. When I am working for design agencies, in a freelance design contact role, my work is more brand comms, print-based work (not digital) so that is either creative design & brand comms projects or annual report design & artwork.How much is your approach different when designing websites for start-ups compared to your other projects?
The main difference is budget and time. For my smaller private clients, you do not have any budget for any extra costs so you have to do everything yourself. So all coding is done by myself, all photography has to be from my royalty-free library that I have built up over the years or I have done my own photography, or I have used abstract imagery and lots of bespoke work in Adobe Illustrator. My first 3-month design contract was a bit of an eye-opener in the fact everyone seemed to have so much time. We spent the first 2 weeks just on naming, then the next 4-6 weeks on design exploration. I am working on another design contract right now, with another top-level agency on annual reports but that is much more frantic and everything is done at high speed, it’s good money, stressful but worth it, and good projects to work on. As far as the approach goes, I would say it’s the same, just different expectations, time, and budget. In terms of coding though, I have used additional developers for a few projects as and when needed, and got extra costs from my client to cover that – but the majority of my sites are B2B brochure-ware sites so usually simple and do not need any advanced functionality. I try to treat smaller projects with just as much passion as the larger well-paying ones. I think you have to maintain that passion otherwise you can get complacent and your design output with slip. I think in design, you are only as good as your last job, so you must keep pushing to be your very best no matter who the project is for. Obviously, with smaller projects, especially websites, you can use theme frameworks to save you time. I took a long time finding the perfect theme, which has become a wonderfully flexible base framework for my projects. I do not really have a set style either. I often get jealous of the cool designers you see on design blogs who have a style to their work and get projects off of that – but that has also been beneficial to me. I design for the client, not for me. I have no ego. I am skilled at finding the right style, design & tone of voice and good at getting my work bang-on in terms of being right for their business. Also, if your work swaps from small clients with tiny budgets, to big design agencies with BlueChip clients with huge budgets, you need to be a ‘design chameleon’ in order to quickly meet each task on its own merit and deliver work that is on the right level as each will have different wants, needs & expectations. Sometimes I worry I am not ‘trendy’ enough, or not ‘on-trend’ at all. Looking at gallery sites such as ‘siteinspire’ can make you feel inadequate and not cool enough, but I remind myself I have been working in this industry since 1994 and have never been out of work. Also, I think about my client and what their needs are, and 95% of them would be scared off if I tried to push ultra-trendy work at them that was not right for them, their business, or their audience. So my advice to anyone starting out, is that if you cannot compete with the best, trendiest designers or you don’t want to – just remember in the real world who you are designing for – and that is for your client, not for yourself. That doesn’t mean you cannot use current trends but do so in a way that is right for the project and the business you are working for. Also, when I did my first design contact in London, I did suffer from ‘imposter syndrome’ – I was working with seasoned top-level creatives and I was from the country-side having only worked for small firms that no one had heard of – but I had the faith in the guy that hired me and the lady who recommended me and reminded myself that I was good enough to fit in. Design is very confidence-led, you need to be happy and confident to produce good work, and for me that comes from all the clients I have worked with over the years.You are also a Presentation Designer. What can you tell me about that part of your work?
One reason I targeted that work is because PowerPoint is a tool a lot of designers hate working with, I became proficient at it and therefore I figured it was a good niche for me to target to get more work as there might be less competition. I see PowerPoint as not really too different from InDesign, albeit with less control over the typography – but if you are skilled in the Creative Suite and branding, you can design & build some really nice work in PowerPoint. I have got a lot of work this way and even won a couple of design contacts for some long-term work in PowerPoint.What are the biggest challenges you face working as a full-time freelancer in the field of web design and branding?
The biggest challenge I think everyone faces is trying to get enough work, and balancing work with paying the bills. I think I have been quite lucky so far, I’m just starting my fifth year in January and these last four years have been quite sporadic in terms of work but I have always been busy. This year and goigin forward, I see myself doing more contracting work with design agencies and less private work. There are a couple of reasons for that, one was I noticed my private work tailing off a bit – having exhausted all my contacts and not many new ones coming through the door. But also because the design contact work pays much much better and you know you are being paid a fixed fee at the end of the month so there’s less stress about bills. Also with the private projects you never know how quickly you can get these done, and it’s ALWAYS the client that slows them down, no matter how much they say they want it ASAP. As soon as you ask them to write some copy, it always slows down. I do part bill now, but one project is 2 years old now and all because I needed my client to write up all his projects as case studies. The private projects are fun though, can be more spontaneous and creative with them – and even done my own photoshoots for a few of them. For instance, I felt my project needed a human element and I wanted to avoid stock shots, so I suggested I come in for a day and photograph the team. They did not have the budget to hire a professional but mine came out perfectly. So that is where the flexibility comes in, if you can be flexible and turn your hand to anything, then freelancing is perfect for you. The other reason, as I stated earlier, is that with design contacts you know what you are going to get paid each week. And each day you get a brief and then can just get on with the work. The money side is much less stressful, although the work side is much more stressful as your clients now are fellow designers who are much more critical than your own private clients. The key for me when I was doing mainly private work, was to find a number of long-standing clients that could give me work every month. I have about 4/5 with whom I have worked for 2-3 years and continue to work for now, even when running full-time design contracts. So you need to be prepared to work evenings and weekends to keep those clients happy. Now I am working on longer design contacts, I am still feeling I cannot turn other work away though – as a design contact can just stop at any time. So you need other work in the background to work on if that happens. So one of the biggest challenges is also do you turn work away or not. I have a few times, and each time it’s left me feeling quite guilty. I know I should for my own sanity, but I also hate not being busy – I thrive on being busy – and really hate the odd quiet days when they come along.Is there anything else about your work that you’d like to share that we haven’t covered?
I don’t think I will go back to a permanent role atm. I love being a freelancer and it’s useful working at home all the time when you have 4 children like I do. But also I keep weighing up the money side, and being a freelancer pays so much better I’d need a very well-paid role if I were to ever switch back. Also even if I did get a ‘proper’ job, I’d probably still do freelance on the side as I have built up so many long-term clients I would not want to let any of them down.To learn more about Martin’s work and Pure Graphic Design, you can visit puregraphic.design
