When I first started out as a freelance designer I did lots of things including advertising layouts, logos and even party invitations. I really enjoyed doing them.
This is an advert that I created for Sporting Billy and Sporting Gifts. The advert featured in Rugby World magazine (the World’s biggest selling rugby magazine) in 2010.
The idea is that each of the products form the line up of player positions on the pitch with a bit of social media thrown in for good measure. I used an image of grass to start with and added some paint effects in Photoshop to make it look a bit less real. Then I pulled the whole thing into Adobe Indesign to build up. I added the frame and then the lines over the top. Each of the ‘players’ were created individually and I think the biggest challenge was getting the text in the box to be small enough to fit but still readable. It all worked out well in the end. QR codes were just being introduced at the time, so this was really quite innovative to include that and I guess the same applies to the social media icons. I cannot really remember life before Twitter but I am sure there was one!
The advertisement generated business for the client, so a good outcome for all of us. Sporting Billy are still around and still use the grass effect in the header of their website.
Moving on
A lot has changed now, I do very little of this graphic design work and focus on my work as a freelance web designer. I think this is because I design and develop and I enjoy the technical side of it, particularly when it comes to working with WordPress.
