Apparently, I have nine seconds to grab your attention...
Everyone calls me Fal.
I’m a graphic designer with 30 years’ experience.
I’m currently freelancing again.
I’m looking for stuff to do.
Here’s my CV. (6MB PDF)
Here’s my Portfolio.
How am I doing for time?
...but just in case you can't be arsed to plough through my portfolio, here's a big montage of stuff wot I've done...
and here's some random stuff in no particular order...
random stuff wot i have done
more random stuff wot i have done
even more random stuff wot i have done
"that's all very well, but what can you actually do?"
graphic design
Illustrations
Social media campaigns
Poster design
CD and vinyl artwork
Branding exercises
Logo creation and design
Logo recreation, reworking and salvage
Pen and ink stuff
Massive, many-layered pointless Photoshop composites
Brochures
Basic animation
Basic 3D stuff
Infographics
Memes
and more…
web design
Wordpress installations
Wordpress content population
Wordpress theme customisation
Wordpress management
Wordpress trouble-shooting, updates, maintenance and emergency fixes
Wordpress e-commerce integration
Custom css tweaks
SEO
and more…
other stuff
Ideas
Suggestions
Research
Problem solving
(Very) basic video editing
Not 9 til 5
Might be around on weekends 🙂
Comically affordable
One of life’s nice blokes
and as an aside...
I've also been Nick Harper's artist of choice since 2004.
Nick Harper: “The Man Who Plays Guitar Like He’s Wearing God’s Underpants” as some music journo dubbed him many years ago. I knew him from school and used to hang around at VE band rehearsals. It was fairly evident even then that they weren’t just “some 6th form band”. There was something a bit special about them.
And as it happens, I was right. Nick has since carved out a very successful solo career spanning five decades, 13 studio albums and various live, compilation and single releases and, much to my joy and dismay, he asked me to do the artwork for his 2004 album Bloodsongs.
And then in 2005 he asked me to do Treasure Island.
Fast forward to 2024 and I’ve just finished all the artwork for the vinyl and CD releases of Earth Day Blue.
I guess I must be doing something right 🙂
You can buy these wonderful sound recordings (and more) at The Harperspace Shop.
and this is Micro Elvis...
All the way from 1992
I’ve included him here because he’s the oldest surviving example of my digital artwork. He was originally a 32 x 32 pixel animated .iff file I created in Dpaint IV on an Amiga 500 way back in 1992. Unfortunately all of my old Amiga disks were destroyed in a house flood but Micro Elvis survived as he’d been converted to a gif animation sometime around 1998 and was used on the website for the company I worked for at the time. After a bit of digging I found him lurking in the depths of the Wayback Machine.
Unfortunately the other Micro anims from this era met their demise in the flood. Which is a shame really, because Micro Hitler was very amusing indeed!
(in)Frequently Asked Questions
I’m one of those creative types with an eye for the whole as well as an eye for the smallest of details.
My artistic flair and 30 years’ experience in my field coupled with an arsenal of top-notch graphic design software makes for a great combination.
I’m also not in the least bit precious about what you ask of me. Some designers think the donkey work is beneath them, but I’ll bring the same dedication and commitment to manually correcting the white balance on 400 wedding photos as I will to taking you through an entire branding exercise or creating all the artwork for your new studio album release.
Basically, if it’s graphic design-related I’m probably the droid you’re looking for.
Let me know your requirements – no matter how big or small, simple or complicated, and I’ll let you know if I can do it.
And if I can’t , I’ll let you know!
I still only charge £30 an hour (which, given my longevity and expertise, is really quite reasonable) although set budgets for things and wiggle-room* are acceptable.
*wiggle-room and piss-taking are treated as two distinctly separate things 🙂
Every project is different. Every client is different. If you have a job that needs doing, let’s discuss it. If I’m the right guy for the job, I’ll be glad to help. If, for whatever reason, I’m not the right guy I’ll say so.
I want you to end up with the best results possible and, from a purely selfish perspective, I don’t want to put my name to anything I’m not 100% happy with.
As Clint Eastwood said in Magnum Force: ” A man’s gotta know his limitations” 🙂
I’m equally as happy to work to a specific and narrow set of instructions (your existing brand guidelines, for instance) as I am being let loose on a project with a free rein and minimal guidance.
Although budgets and schedules must be agreed on at the start, life and circumstance can throw the odd spanner in from time to time, so some changes to both are entirely acceptable*
Once the brief, budget and schedule have been agreed on, I’ll start work. I usually send an update as and when there’s something significant to show you, so we can both track the project’s progress and make sure it’s kept on track.
*Please see the disclaimer in the “How much do you charge” box above 🙂
*Please see the disclaimer in the “How much do you charge” box above 🙂
Digitally since about 1992. Firstly in Dpaint IV on an Amiga 500, and later in some very early version of Corel Draw/Photopaint on Windows 3.1
These days it’s the Adobe suite of products – so Photoshop, Illustrator, Animate, Premiere etc – as well as Xara (which I’ve faithfully used in all its versions since 1996’s CorelXara launch)
My professional design career – as in actual real people paying me to do actual real work – began in 1996 when I started a web design company with a friend of mine.
Nothing I studied has any relevance to it whatsoever.
My love of pen-and-ink drawing only started after I was gifted the first 350 issues of 2000 AD in (about) 1984. I spent many hundreds of hours trying to emulate Brian Bolland, Mike McMahon, Cam Kennedy, Carlos Ezquerra et al…to varying degrees of success and failure!
The discovery of DPaint IV was one of my life’s biggest turning points.
Having just typed that last bit, it makes me sound desperately sad and uninteresting!
A web designer should have a solid understanding of what a graphic designer does, and vice versa, but they don’t usually excel at both. Generally their strengths lie in one of the two camps.
As a graphic designer I have a robust understanding of web design principles. I know what works and what doesn’t. I know the limitations and boundaries, and know how to work within them.
I’m also very experienced with WordPress, from its initial set-up, through site building and population to maintenance, upkeep and updates. I’m also fairly confident at editing/adding custom CSS to a design…
Just don’t ask me to build anything from scratch. To me that’s “Here Be Dragons” country 🙂
By their very nature they’re rushed, meaning they won’t be up to either your standards or mine.
Of course, from time-to-time there will be the need for some legitimate last-minute changes – sometimes they can’t be avoided – and as long as they don’t interfere with anyone else’s project or deadlines, I’ll be happy to help*
*Please see the disclaimer in the “How much do you charge” box above 🙂
Just as it’s quite feasible for someone to adequately repair their own car with a half-decent toolkit and the relevant Haynes manual, so it might be that you can put something half-decent together in Canva.
But then, there’s a lot of people out there doing that…
And you want to stand out from the rest, right? 😉
Of course not.
I live and breathe pixels, and my office chair doubles (triples?) as a bed AND a commode.
I last saw daylight in 2004.
🙂
This is not me with a purple beard murdering an Abba song on a pink Washburn A20.
Honest.
Am I the droid you're looking for?
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