From the very start, my focus is on listening to understand your specific needs and looking at how I can best help you meet them, so the end result genuinely supports your business. This includes extensive research on your industry, and who your competitors are, so that we can create material that is uniquely yours but also reflects a style in keeping with what people would expect to see as reflecting professionalism in your field.
That’s one of my favourite parts of the process!
You can expect honest guidance, a collaborative process, and a considered approach to every project. Our focus is on doing the right work, for the right reasons, in a way that feels easy and stress‑free for you… here’s something of my life story so that you can see how my experience has layered up over my career….
My early life
As a young child I loved to draw and paint. I was born in Vancouver, Canada and came to England at 5 years old. For a short while we stayed with my grandparents in Brentwood, Essex and I started primary school in Pilgrims Hatch.
I was naturally pretty shy, and moving across the world where everyone was curious about my Canadian accent was quite difficult for me. The class teacher must have realised this and seemed to be very impressed with my art work, so while other kids in class were working on other lessons, I was given paints and paper to create with, then she would take me around to all te other classes in the school to show them my artworks. That teacher was so ahead of her time!
We moved home quite a lot as I was growing up, but settled in Bishop’s Stortford when I was 10, attending Northgate Primary School then St Mary’s. Shyness was still a big problem for me, but my drawings were always on the classroom walls.
As a teen through the 1980’s I developed a love of hair and make up, a mask, the bigger the better the bolder the brighter, I really enjoyed painting my face, and hair in bold bright colours. Television programmes like The Thornbirds, pop videos, specially Michael Jackson’s Thriller further inspired me. I wanted to be a make up artist!
A huge stumbling block here was that I was still very very shy and at that time I was told that I would have to gain hairdressing experience to be eligible for any make up artist role. I tried, but hairdressing is in practicality very little about bold dramatic art and a lot about making small talk. This just wasn’t for me..
Sign Design 1989-2000
One of the salon owners where I was working happened to meet a guy who had a signwriting business. I went along to meet him and started work at Sign Design in 1989. This was just at the point where the digital revolution was about to change everything about how signs and media were created.
Our client base was varied. We did a lot of work for the breweries, which involved technical drawings on detail paper, that would then be put through a dyeline machine to make copies that would be sent to planning departments. Then we would physically make the signs, often with gold leaf on painted stencils.
I would use a ‘blow up camera’ (basically, a projector) to trace small images and lettering to reproduce them where required. Typefaces and fonts were limited. We used Gerber 4B lotters that we plugged font cartridges into. We had a few popular standards of our own as they were expensive to buy, and hired specials for larger jobs, or I used the blow up camera and Lettraset book to trace and digitise the letters we needed. I would also draw pictures for window and mirror vinyl. This would entail creating patterns and drawings in pencil on paper to be plotted in frosted vinyl for window and mirror decoration, which I particularly enjoyed, and often went on site with the lads to fix them in place.
We also worked with a number of building developers creating sign boards, and we did an awful lot of vehicle livery, from large fleets of lorries and vans, helicopters, boats and aeroplanes.
In 1993 we got our first windows based computers with Graphix Advantage software and CorelDraw Suite, which is similar to Adobe Illustrator and included package of programmes for vector, photo editing and desktop publishing. Adobe was more widely adopted by the print industry, Corel was the standard for the sign industry. This really opened the scope, suddenly there were so many fonts to choose from, and the scanner said goodbye to the old ‘blow up camera’… tho’ of course it was some learning curve. It was generally assumed that because I was young I would somehow automatically know how to do everything, we had a one-day seminar at Spandex headquarters which was mostly about selling the products, and telling us what we could do with their amazing software, and a bit about the icons and file manager, but no hands on instruction.
One of my very first jobs on the new equipment was to create vinyl decals for an exhibition from a client’s 3″ floppy disk. Whatever I tried would not work. I had the whole workplace, and the client standing around me telling me, quite angrily, that I should make something happen, but it wasn’t going to. In exasperation I ran the file through MSAV, the early Windows antivirus software, and sure enough it flagged that the disk was infected. A lesson I have never, ever forgotten!
I loved working at Sign Design. I met my now husband there, he worked around the corner. I even persuaded my boss that I could bring a dog to work. I was often left alone when everyone went out to fix the signs I made, and I managed to convince him it’d be safer for the workplace. I then adopted my first own dog from a rescue network and called my new German Shepherd co‑worker Stone.
Many things changed through the 90s. Changes in politics affected how breweries operated and we did less pub work but more restaurant work. I was comfortable with design software from the start and I was able to help provide floor plans and internal layouts for planning permission purposes. I even designed a complete new floor plan for London City Airport. I was also learning more about designing for print and digital media. I made my first website in 1999, but my boss had no interest in the digital progression.
Sign Design then merged with another company to become “Sign Team”. There was no team {quietly we called it “pass‑the‑buck team”). It brought a new hierarchy and a new boss. He was purely unpleasant, and the job was no longer a joy. My husband was earning well, so in 2000 I left to become freelance, and share a little more of my work-life balance with my passion for dogs.
Print experience
Copyzone In-house Designer 2000 – 2010 (TBC)
I was introduced to Copyzone Ltd by a mutual friend in 2000. They used Windows with CorelDraw rather than Mac with Adobe and Quark, which was unusual back then, so we could work fluidly together. The owner at the time was very open that he didn’t really ‘get’ design but appreciated that his clients often wanted their material to look more professionally set.
The majority of their work at the time was photo-copying, document archiving and litho prin, and I would mostly pop in a few times a week to collect an deliver work, and stand in for holiday needs. I was also doing more website work at this time with was not within their scope, so this arrangement offered me thee best of both. The opportunity to ‘team connect’ and while also giving me the freedom to work on web and digital media projects at a time when websites were relatively new and technology was moving quickly.