I have been operating my little business since 1995 and in that time I have worked for some wonderful people, doing some wonderful things. I started seven years prior, working in a typesetting bureau (remember those?) for the majority of that time. When I started, the operation majored in the output of bromide and colour-separated film from customers’ files. Not long after starting, artworking was
an extra service that the business offered, so I threw myself into it and that was the start of how I got to where I am today.
When I left the business, one of the customers I had been servicing, a small advertising agency, offered me desk space as a Creative Artworker. Given their diminutive size, they had some pretty impressive clients to play with and I was eventually charged with looking after them all, in the capacity of their sole Mac Operator! Based in Croydon, they serviced the two main shopping centres and other local businesses, as well as larger concerns such as the Allders group of department stores (showing my age, there!), Virgin Airways, The Terence Higgins Trust and Viglen Computers among very many others.
It sometimes required the need to work some silly hours and in my younger days, 36 hour shifts were a walk in the park - not quite so sure about that now, though! However, retail and shopping centres was a discipline that would later develop into a mainstay of my work output. When the Marketing Manager of one of the Croydon shopping centres moved to work at another in Tunbridge Wells, after a short amount of time being unhappy with the level of support being given by their marketing team, we were asked to become involved. Very soon into that period, we were taken on permanently to look after the entire UK portfolio of Westfield ShoppingTowns - at the time, the largest shopping centre business worldwide.
My hot-desk had my Macs and a telephone which was my direct connection to anything upwards of 15 marketing managers across eight shopping centres and Westfield’s head office. For a while, I was the sole artworker, looking after the entire UK business under the agency’s creative direction. Over time, other larger marketing and advertising companies entered the fray, including Mary Portas’ outfit. They took over the role of designing and delivering creative campaigns; however, it wasn’t long until the marketing managers started to re-direct work back to me, as I was constantly able to handle the roll-out of such campaigns, personalised for each centre, quicker and more cost-effectively than the larger ‘team happy’ agencies, with their 3-figure hourly rates.
And that’s how it carried on. For 13 years. When Westfield started selling off their centres to other companies, many maintained their relationship with me. Some of the marketing team moved on to pastures new and, because of their experience of my abilities, proposed that I carry on working with them, which I did. At the time of writing this, I can say that I have customers for whom I have provided my services for over two decades!
Today, the agency I started with no longer exists, but I inherited some of their client base and continue to serve them to this day on a fully remote basis. Design, artwork and roll-out, copywriting, managing suppliers and delivering finished items for production swiftly and efficiently. Versed in the production of print items from stationery to large format, digital imagery, conforming to corporate identities and serving corporate businesses and large agencies.
My portfolio can be found here: https://pubhtml5.com/wuar/iagt/
Within these pages are examples of some of the work I have produced over time, all artworked on my own.
