Working in advertising or graphic design, to people in ‘ordinary’jobs is either a glamerous job filled withbeautiful people, exotic photo shoots and long lunches.
Or a world populated by a bunch of overpaid art school nancy-boys and lemon sucking po faced women with heavy drug habits, making really annoying commercials for the latest Ford Menopause sports utility vehicle..
My expertise, if you can call it that, is through -the- line advertising. This isn’t your fancy big budget commercials (or films, as top creatives call them). It’s all the stuff the superstar creatives wouldn’t touch with yours.
The Direct Marketing, the Door Drop, the Shelf Sticker, the end of gondola display(don’t ask ).
Sure, you do get the occasional ad to do. But there’s no huge photo shoot. It’s probably a Trade ad, or a small black and white ad in the regional press.
Oh, and don’t try to have a witty headline or some stylish photography. There won’t be any room left once you include the coupon (with a scissors motif,just in case people don’t realise they have to cut it out to post it ), the telephone number in a type size for the hard - of - seeing and the starburst telling you to hurry while stocks last!
Since going freelance most of my work has been for small,through -the-line Ad agencies needing a hand with creative work for new business pitches. This can be quite excitng. A blank pad, with no restrictions.
I usually ride (bike) into town. Meet the creative director and account exec at the agency to be briefed.It only takes an hour or so, I sit in the board room sipping my coffee, stroking my chin, nodding sagely and playing with my stylish Oakley reading glasses (age!) in a creative person sort of way,whilst they waffle on about target audience and other facinating facts.
Briefing over I ride home again.I usually have a couple of days to come up with some ideas. Agencies expect three routes or campaigns to show to their prospective client.
So that’s one straight fairly safe route, a slightly more edgy idea,and a really mad,crazy idea that all the creatives like but the MD'wife hates.
I usually present my ideas as magic marker sketches on layout paper, but increasingly agencies expect you to present visuals produced on an Apple personal computer. ( Mac visuals)
This brings me neatly round to the other area of my freelance work.
Graphic design.
I sometimes wonder how small Graphics outfits make any money at all. I have people call me up having seen my ad in the local Yellow Pages. They’re looking for, in the main, letterhead and business card design but sometimes even a logo and complete corporate identity .
These callers are, like me, small businesses trying to make a living. however when I mention my fee they gasp in amazement. “that’s a bit steep” they say .
It seems that they think I do this stuff for fun, I tell them I have 25 years experience, and I do this to earn a living in much the same way they fit replacement windows or whatever.
The trouble is at the back of their mind they’re thinking they could always design it themselves!!.
Since the advent of the dreaded PC nearly everyone thinks they’re a designer. I need look no further than my own father! A man in his mid seventies he spends his retirement designing posters and flyers for various organisations in the Warwick area on his home PC. He rings me from time to time to ask advice on type or how to retouch out a splodge on a picture in Photoshop!
Don’t get me wrong the PC/Mac is a very useful tool. In days gone by if I was doing a visual that had,say, a black background with white type, it would take forever hand drawing the type and then carefully colouring in the background round it. Now I can have the background any colour I like,I can change the font, its size, its colour,
its position on the page.
All at the click of a pearly white Apple mouse.
Thankfully however there is still no “ idea button on a computer!
So perhaps my skills and experience are good for a few years yet.
Work

I knew when I started to work freelance 8 or 9 years ago ( You lose all sense of time when you’re freelance )
exactly how my ideal day would pan out.
After waving Julie (chief bread winner and all round super mum ) off to work I would finish my breakfast, take my daughter Lauren to school, and then pop down to my local shops (butcher,baker,candlestick emporium,) to pick up the days provisions.
I’d be home by 9.30 ready do some really fantastic creative ads, or some stylish design work on my newly acquired Apple computer thingy.
Well, that was the plan, and in fact, right up to the bit where I return home, that’s pretty much my daily routine.
Julie leaves the house at some ungodly hour. Usually on the way out the door she’ll ask me to remember to do something which i’ll instantly forget about.... until about 5 minutes before she comes home!
I then have to supply Lauren ( my daughter ) with endless bowls of breakfast cereal and toast while she sits in a semi-trance watching TV. Usually some terrible Disney channel sitcom featuring some very loud American girls all shouting at one another.I don’t actually take her to school anymore. About 8.30 Sophie,one of her classmates knocks on the door and the two of them go off to school together, staggering under a pile of school bags full of football boots (regular and astroturf ) netball kit, (very sporty these girls ) lunch boxes,crumpled up bits of homework,leaking pens and old sweet wrappers.
I quite miss taking her to school. It was a way of keeping track of what was going on.
Or as Lauren seems to think, it was my excuse to say hello to all the ‘yummy mummies’, Honestly!
Me - “Hi”
Unknown mum - “hello”
Lauren- “whose that dad?
Me - “I don’t know”
Lauren - ‘“but that lady just said Hello”
Me - “Yes, she did didn’t she” smiling to myself in a Leslie Phillips kind of way .
Anyway, after the girls wander off mumbling “see ya later ” I take myself down to our rather excellent parade of local shops.First stop is the paper shop,not any old paper shop, and we do have a lot of paper shops in our street,but Sat’s shop.
Sat’s newspaper shop is where, along with ordinary people, freelancers, part timers, the semi-retired (as a friend calls me), house husbands and various ner -do-wells gather to debate the important events going on in the world today..
Here I can buy my paper and discuss the tragic events taking place at Sunderland football club or the dearth of UK tours by obscure US blues bands from the 70’s. with my friendly newsagent Sat.
Next door to Sats is a rather fantastic butcher shop.So fantastic in fact, that on a Saturday you have to queue to get in. The queue can stretch out of the shop and down the street.
A queue so long,that in theory, you can be in the paper shop next door buying your Saturday Independent and be in the queue for the butchers at the same time!I. I don’t know what it is but every time I go in, they’re usually just coming to the punch line of a very unsavoury joke!
The staff of the butchers shop all look like “real butchers”. You know, big hands, big bodies, hilarious facial hair. They also fancy themselves at mind reading, trying to second guess me.
“hello sir, Pound of extra lean mince?” or “chicken fillets? “ Blimey am I that predictable.!!
I feel really good when they guess wrongly “Actually I’ll have that pork loin..chinned and scored please”. I can hear them say ”bleedin’Jamie Oliver” under their breath when they turn their back to perform my request.
Every couple of days I’ll visit the Parkers the Baker . This is your timewarp bakers shop with an old - but - probably -back -in - fashion bakalite sign outside, and a wonderful fresh bread smell inside.This incidently is another shop that on Saturdays has a queue outside. Shopping can take a while in Northfields,best bring along some reading material.(see paper shop)
The shop is owned by mrs Parker.Y ou don’t see mrs Parker very often, She rolls up in her Mercedes from time to time to check up on the staff.( Did you see what I did there, rolls up,bakers.geddit?)
Parkers is run on a day to day basis and with an iron fist by Sylvia. A Liverpudlian with a tongue so sharp you could slice a Crusty Bloomer with it.Again like the Butchers they tend to guess my choice of bread.
“Sandwich loaf? Healthy? (granary ) Unhealthy? (White ) Sliced, like yourself?” Thats Thick sliced..geddit?
mmm Liverpudlian humour!
“Ooh, Northfields has such a villagey feel to it” as one creep commented on the local ‘community’(god, I hate
that word ) website. But,he’s right you know!