Communication - marketing/advertising/promotions and direct mail


All of my experience in below and through-the-line activities came at Walsh Simmons.

It was a period of firsts: first full-blown online store, first online bank, first Premiere League club site and so on.

We picked up awards and began to develop a reputation for our websites. As creative director I had to find a way of working that brought programmers together with designers despite interfrerence from account managers. Strategic campaign planning and site mapping and were processes I developed intuitively from my experience setting out print and marking up typography. Together Steve and I would map and remap sites working and reworking navigation and layout and teasing out 'the big idea' by endless re-works, often right down to the last moment. These were successful campaigns, ideas that delivered campaign by camapign, but aesthetic judgements, mediated by usability, tended towards the middle ground.



I call it communication rather than marketing, not out of snobbery, but because we worked the grey zone between design, marketing and advertising. We weren’t a fully-blown marketing company and we certainly weren’t a design studio. Steve Walsh believed in the power of big ideas (‘it’s all about ideas, all about results’ his favourite tagline), something that was anathema to me at first. The range of client work was testing, in a healthy way. Walsh Simmons had grown up on retail F&D, travel and financial sectors. We added sports clothing, internal communications and developed existing sectors.

It was a fascinating, if over-long, experience. The scale of the projects that went through the studio, and the frequency – we had up to five account managers all with full portfolios – demanded a rigorous process.

‘Making’ ideas in the context of researched content and identifiable targets is reasonably rewarding if mostly superficial. Strategic and tactical thinking based on a sustainable partnership between client, designer and customer is far more rewarding, both from a personal and project results perspective. Towards the end of my tenure as Creative Director and subsequently partner at Walsh Simmons I found a way of working more closely with clients and their customers, building a businesses communication essence and engineering visual identities alongside tactical and strategic campaigns in an additive rather than a erratic way.

During the fifteen years there were a few opportunities to work with interesting visual collaborators, Bernard Oglesby, Dom at Corporation Pop and John Walsh. But the majority of projects were below-the-line campaigns, technically and conceptually interesting but visually undemanding. The exciting new processes I was experimenting with needed new challenges. It was time to strike out again.