Design’s competitive enough without the mass of pretenders

I’m starting up a design company from the unenviable position of having no clients. It’s proving to be very hard work. Despite being a freelance graphic and publishing designer for 15 years, I didn’t build relationships directly with the end-client. I didn’t do that thing most designers do: nick clients from my employers and make them my own. So it’s lots of marketing, cold calls, advertising and so on.

These days there’s new competition for start-up firms: the self-appointed designer. These include Web technicians calling themselves Web designers and printers that claim to design as well as print. There is not an ounce of aesthetic sensitivity among some of these, but they’re competing to be heard among the shouting masses, ensuring that those who can design have to shout all the louder.

God save us from Mac operators who claim to know the first subtleties of design – as if others who gave up four years of their life to study design did it in vain or through stupidity.

Traci Rochester, Managing director, Boost Multimedia, Bristol BS7 8JW