Little Bulldog Design

I’ve never been great at keeping up with this blog, but despite that little bulldog is definitely alive and kicking. In more ways than one nowadays. While I’m still always up for a bit of lovely identity design or some retail signage, I’m also starting to develop a range of stationery and other items. Still early days at the moment.                                                                                                              This site will be redesigned and updated to include that side of the business, but for the moment please visit my shops at Folksy or Etsy. You can also follow my design & craft led blog, bonbah, or my children’s book blog, Reading to George and please find me on Twitter and Facebook.

It’s been a while (ages). But finally a second post.

There seems to have been a steady increase in animated adverts over the past year or so. Which is brilliant for those of us who hate cheesy ads and love animation. I like to think there’s a move away from hard sell happening and a bit more interest in entertaining the audience.

One agency that gives us a consistent supply on beautifully animated adverts is Studio aka. The attention to detail is incredible and in each one they create a new visual world. Some of their more mainstream work includes the latest string of adverts for Lloyds TSB, such as For the Journey, Mortgages, and Save the Change.

They were also behind the stunning Guinness advert that has been shown during rugby matches. It’s about the most attention I’ve ever paid to rugby!

In a similar style is their BMW Road Monster advert which is really spectacular when shown at the cinema. I love the children’s book style narration.

A similar advert, although I’m not sure who did this one, is the current Smirnoff Signature advert which visually traces the history of the vodka.

The animated Robinson’s adverts (and this one) have been around for a while, but they’re really lovely. Bartle Bogle Hegarty, the agency behind the ads, have created a wonderful children’s world that stands out a mile from the usual cereal and drinks ads aimed at kids. The music is great and will appeal to the parents, but profit and sales aside, they are just beautiful to look at.

This website has been in the making for a while, but due to too few hours during the day (and night) it’s been a bit slow coming together. But the new year is a good time to start so here it is.

2007 was a great year for me in the freelance world. I worked with some brilliant people on better projects than I ever even dreamt of when I was permanently employed. Sometimes I felt like pinching myself. Who knew you could actually get paid to do work you enjoy?! And this year is already looking good.

2007 had only one real dilemma which was a couple of requests to see my concepts without payment. I know this is an age old debate. Do you free pitch or not? I think it’s best to get it out in the open, up front and from the beginning, that I don’t do any spec work.

Free pitching was something I wondered about when I first went freelance. I even went to a talk - Win Without Pitching - given by Blair Enns. His solutions are aimed at large agencies and are much larger in scale than applies to me, but it gave me that initial boost to start believing that designers shouldn’t offer up their services for free. There are a lot of websites out there offering thoughts and solutions on this topic for both the designer/agency and the client too - namely No!Spec.

It’s not just an ethical question, but also a financial one. Most of the work I do is concept and I’ve been told over and over again that this is my strength and it’s definitely what I love. I put alot of time, thought and passion into concept work and I can’t get any of that back or resell it if I don’t get paid the first time around. So if I work for free then when I do get paid, it will need to be at a much much higher rate to make up for what I’ve lost. My rates are very fair and I want to keep them that way and to be honest, I don’t ever want to start thinking that what I do isn’t worth anything. So there you are - no free stuff! Rant over no need to speak of it again! Next time will be all about fabulous designy things - I promise.