GRAPHIC DESIGN, DIGITAL & PRINT

I’m a creative designer who likes to draw and paint. If I’m not making exciting work for my clients then I’m making exciting work for myself at every available opportunity. I like to write too, when I can, and you may have read my work in various outdoor or running magazines over the years. I tend to produce things that involve all of these skills – drawing, painting, writing, creative problem-solving (using as much of my humanness as I can essentially) – not because I’m anti AI, but because I love making art and visuals and solving problems with my imagination and logic.

When a graphic designer asks what I do, I say “artist” and when an artist asks what I do, I say “graphic designer”.

PRINT DESIGN

I design books (and illustrate them), reports (academic reports, end of year reports, often with illustrations too), record sleeves (12″, 7″ and album art), flyers, posters and lots of other things that need to look like they were made by a creative designer, an artist and a professional.

WEB DESIGN

I make brochure websites, often in WordPress, but sometimes in Squarespace and Wix. I can use most content management systems and building web pages from scratch is no issue either. I’d describe myself as a front-end developer (that’s what it was called when I started coding) but UI designer describes my skill set just as easily. I like working with information architecture (the order information comes in and the way it’s organised on the page) too; websites are still documents after all, just like reports and big documents are. Design is about structure as much as it is about colour and shape and form. Read more about my web work here.

DIGITAL ART AND ANIMATION

I make digital art too, which can be animated. I can’t animate other people’s work, only my own, sadly. If you have something you want me to animate, I need to be able to draw it myself from scratch. Many people and organisations find that my animations are useful for social media and for adverts.

SPECIALISMS

You can hire me as a specialist, if you need one for your project.

• Hand-drawn art, digital painting and creative, artistic design
• Illustration (digital, pencil, pen and ink)
• User Interface (UI) design
• Front-end development (I’m proficient in CSS, HTML, templates etc.)
• Animation (only my own work)
• Information architecture (the way information is organised in a document, including a website)
• Problem-solving (my clients have told me to include this! Apparently I do it very, very well)

Interested? Send me an email here.

GENERAL DESIGN INFORMATION

More broadly, it really is a pleasure to take your ideas from notions in the ether (scribbled diagrams, plans you made in the pub) to real-world things – both print and digital – that your audience and clients will enjoy, engage with and share. Reports, websites, documents, posters… It’s great to see something you’ve worked on published, made real and come to life in the public realm.

I’m here to help you with the layouts, the imagery, the information architecture, the visual identity and the feel, and create something that your audience will want to keep. I can manage a lot of the print and the publishing work for you too (Lulu files for book publishing, finding a printer for big documents and reports, understanding technical specifications for publishers etc.). I’ve been painting and drawing complex art and getting it printed for a long time now.

Report design is something that I do a lot of. The costs can be high, but they will include art and illustration, infographics, layout design, plus print management and an extra pair of eyes to catch errors with (and there are ALWAYS things that need to be caught in big documents like that). If you want academic reports, AGM reports or reports designed to impress your stakeholders with, just let me know via an email from the Contact page.

There’s also a post from the blog (and there’s free artwork and assets elsewhere on the blog, so do have a poke around if you like free hand-drawn graphics) on the subject of designing big documents.

I make a lot of logos, often for travel and nature-themed organisations. I love the natural world and I spend a lot of time in it, often running, often hiking and occasionally swimming too. I’m based near the Peak District and the landscape and the wildlife often pop up in my work if they’re given the chance. I’m very happy indeed around mountains, lakes, animals and plants.

There’s no AI in what I do.