I'm Steve Perry, a designer and developer with over 15-years of professional experience in Branding, UI/UX, HTML/CSS, WordPress and Magento eCommerce.

UK business website and email signature legislation

Posted on January 6, 2012

Every company needs to list its company registration number, place of registration and registered office address on its website and in email signatures. Small and medium size companies are particularly at risk of fines as most do not include all of the essential information on their websites and in their email signatures.

Here’s a quick checklist to ensure that you comply with The Companies (Registrar, Languages and Trading Disclosure) Regulations 2006. Every company website and email signature must include the following information:

  1. Company name
  2. Geographic address (including trading and registered names if these are different)
  3. Trading address
  4. Registered office address
  5. Company registration number and place of registration (e.g. company registered in England and Wales)
  6. If you are a member of a trade or professional association, membership details (including any registered number) should also be shown
  7. If the business has a VAT number it should be stated (prefixed with GB if it trades outside the UK)

Freelance bidding websites flawed?

Posted on December 4, 2011

This week I signed up to a popular freelance site. A website where clients and agencies post projects for freelancers to bid on and win work. On the outset I thought that this seemed like quite a good way to win work.
After filling in all of the relevant data and creating a freelance profile, I started looking through some live projects. Everyone which I came across gave little information on the scope of the project. Here’s a few anonymous examples.

We need business cards for 22 persons, from 3 different websites and with a range of different logos. We provide details and business card template, we need someone to do the job on Photoshop for us. The job should take around 2 days, please send me a quote if you are interested. Regards.

The problem with the above is that the client is dictating what software the designer needs to use. No professional designer will use Adobe Photoshop to layout business cards. Doing so will create problems with pre-press and cause the client extra cost when the project goes to print. The client is also supplying the template which is to be used, this will need to be checked, and possibly re-created, to ensure it’s press-ready. They then dictate how long it will take whilst supplying no guide to budget allocation.

I need a designer to create various info-graphics from supplied data. They will be working on a number of different client projects. The designer must take the data, and the brief for the graphic and come up with a design in keeping with the clients’ bands. The first project will involve taking data collected about Facebook and representing it for non-technical, non-it literate business professionals.

This one is a little better and the client provides a little more information. However, there is still plenty of relevant data missing; Where will the info-graphic be used – print or digital, or both? How much data is to be supplied to the designer and how will that be supplied? No examples of the client’s brands are given. Will logos etc., be supplied?

Now on the outset my above comments may seem a little nit-picky. However, to do either of the above jobs professionally and profitably (for both parties) all, plus more, of that information is required. A discussion needs to take place and the above concerns need to be raised. Advice about using the correct software along with some guidance will save the client time, money and a lot of hair-pulling. It will also make the designer’s job a lot easier. The main problem is that when you try to bid on those projects, with the aim of giving a rough ball-park figure at the outset along with some advice, the website forces you to give a specific cost for the job along with a detailed proposal. Which is totally impossible to do.

Consider the following scenario. You send an estate agent an electronic form for them to fill in. Your brief at the top of that form is ‘I would like to buy a house. I want that house in 1 week and it needs to perfectly accommodate my lifestyle and my family’s requirements’. No other information is given. The fields which the estate agent can fill in to win your project are as follows:

  1. Proposal
  2. Price of house
  3. Expected deposit

I can’t imagine that either party would get very far.

So are these types of websites fundamentally flawed?

What does identity design cost?

Posted on November 21, 2011
This is the mother of all FAQs. But it’s a fair question, and it deserves an answer. As phrased by Mike Walsh, Assistant Professor of Marketing, West Virginia University:

“Logo change is not a trivial undertaking. How much do companies typically spend when designing a logo? In my past life, I’ve working in the advertising industry and I know there is no easy answer. In fact, I’ve looked at various trade publications hoping for some quote/reference on this topic. No luck so far.”

Right, Mike; it’s not easy to answer – and you won’t find much good reporting on it. (The press, in fact, is drawn to stories of tens, indeed hundreds of millions in costs of “image change,” based however on retail format changes or on advertising media expenses incidental to rebranding, where rebranding planning and design costs themselves were comparatively small.)

This is from Tony Spaeth’s Identity Works, where the full discussion is available.

When you live and breath prosperity with a belief that everything is in huge supply, and that we are all entitled to have all that we can, you start actively treating yourself and others in this fashion. This principle applies to the acquisition of wealth, personal happiness, health, intellectual pursuits, and everything else. It relates to the ancient Biblical promise ‘To him that hath, shall more be given.’ It truly works. This universe is an incomprehensibly large enterprise, too big for any of us to begin to comprehend from the perspective of our limited bodies. Abundance reigns everywhere. The only limits we have are those that we encourage with our belief in those limits.”

Dr Wayne Dyer, You’ll See It When You Believe It

Dress to impress

Posted on November 9, 2011

Picture this. You’re all set for your important job interview, the one you have been waiting for. You are all showered, you’ve done your research and you are ready to sell yourself. The only thing left to do is to make yourself look the part.

So you put on your brightest holiday shorts, the ones with the holes in them, your favourite Fat Willy’s, yellow, t-shirt and your comfortable sandals. After-all, you have got to be comfortable, right? And it’s all about what you want to wear isn’t it?

Now for most of you the last bit will sound a little bit odd. However this is how people approach their business communications design. Instead of tailoring them exactly to the requirements of the target audience, they are tailored to their interests i.e. using their favourite colours or using fonts which they think look nice. This is very bad news for business. Now I’m not pointing the finger as I’ve seen both designers and marketing departments / business owners at fault here.

Corporate communications materials / the brand – corporate identity all the way through to internal documents and how the telephone is answered – is of paramount importance. Get it right from the start and, more importantly, stick to it.

A professional designer can help with this and can also offer a set of Corporate Guidelines, which will help businesses stay on track and to create that all important business asset – the brand.

Should I work for free?

Posted on November 2, 2011

Following on from previous posts – how designers should charge for their work and designers should value their work – I thought I’d write a little bit about something which inspired me recently.

It’s the side project of, and these are her words not mine – Jessica Hische, a crazy cat lady known for her lettering, silly projects, and occasional foul mouth. The ‘it’ of which I talk is a CSS-based mini-site which is basically a flow-chart which designers can follow to help them decide whether to work ‘free-of-charge’. It’s a little project which is, of course, a little tongue-in-cheek but nicely done and it looks great.

View the CSS mini-site here.

You can also buy the letterpress version here.

Jessica was recently interviewed by Digital Arts Magazine where she talks about ‘cheap designers being like free sofas’. You can read the full interview here but be warned, the advertising on their website is pretty full on and you may have to wait 30-seconds or so to get to the interview. It’s worth the wait, though.

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