Creative spotlight: Liam Gorman, Designer Director at Repton Creative design agency

This month, we sat down with Liam Gorman, Design Director at Repton Creative, to talk about the challenges of starting your own agency, building brands for start-ups and collaborating with other agencies to tackle larger projects. Liam also tells us about the important tools helping push his creative work further, and what inspires him day to day…

Tell us a little bit about your background as a designer

I’d always wanted to be a car designer or an architect as a child. I suspect that my misspent childhood playing with Lego might have had something to do with this. Having sketched my way through the Biology lectures at what was a very academic sixth form college, I decided to go against the grain and study design at university. I hoped that my interest in analytics and problem solving could combine effectively with my fascination with design. Fortunately, it worked out for me, and this combination of analytical and creative still forms the foundation of my offering as a professional. 

Having cut my teeth as part of an in-house design team in the Midlands, I moved to a top 40 B2B agency in Bristol working with larger clients such as BT and Compass Group before making the move to London, where I spent three years at a Soho-based agency in a senior role. The culmination of this journey was realised last year when I jumped full-time into my own company, Repton Creative.

What does your work involve day to day?

Project-wise, I have accrued years of experience in everything from branding through to developing websites, and I find that I use most of these skills every week. Typically, I am working on several projects at one time, so timeframes can be very fast-paced compared to teams focused on one project.

A top procrastination-busting tip is to plan the day in blocks, based on projects, and commit fully to switching your entire focus between projects when the time comes. Without doing this, I found that my attention would be flicking between different projects at the same time, which is a highly unproductive way of working.

Where do you get your inspiration from?

It may sound a bit clichéd, but I find that inspiration can spring out at any time or place. I try to walk as much as possible in Central London, as it offers a huge amount of visual stimulation – from quirky independent shops or galleries, to looking up at a strange piece of architecture catching your eye.

We are fortunate these days that there is a wealth of visual inspiration available on the internet, from Pinterest boards through to online magazines and of course other agencies’ portfolios. Design Week is a personal favourite of mine, where full projects are shown in detail.

What has been your favourite project to work on in your career?

I’ve been lucky enough to work on some great projects, and a good number have been important milestones in my career to date. A recent highlight would be designing the branding for Capital On Tap – a finance firm for small businesses, with almost 50,000 customers on the books. With the rise of Fintech and the prevalence of start-ups in general, I find that many firms are adapting to this market by freshening and modernising their branding.

I was lucky enough to collaborate with two creatives at the top of their game (from The Table London) for this brief. While I was solely tasked with the conceptual and creation side of the branding, it was crucial to bounce ideas off each other as a team and really drive the strongest ideas further forward.

Tell us a little about Repton Creative

Having eight years of experience dealing with projects from pitching to delivery, and with a full-service skill set, I decided it was time to take the leap of faith and start my own company. Essentially, Repton Creative exists to deliver agency quality design work from across the board, without the bloated costs of working with large teams. While it had been great to work with established businesses across the country, startups have long been something that really interested me.

Setting out in August 2017 with that vision, I am pleased to say that I work with both large companies in the B2B sector and various startups, designing and developing almost anything they need. Alongside working directly with businesses, this lightweight approach as a design supplier allows me to collaborate with other creative teams on larger projects.

As the company grows, I may look at hiring a team, but the principles of being efficient and striving beyond the budget for quality will always be the foundation.

What project are you most looking forward to working on and why?

I am currently designing and prototyping an eCommerce website for a bespoke shoe maker. The look and feel is something between hipster and Bond Street, and the product is fantastic, so it’s an interesting challenge visually. I’m looking forward to seeing it developed, as the functionality will include live 3D shoe constructors and excellent photography.

What have you found to be the biggest challenge in your role?

Throughout our career as designers, there are so many technical challenges to overcome when we first encounter them. To name a couple would be the joy of making HTML emails consistent across all inboxes, or troubleshooting mailboxes on dedicated servers without any guidance. These are the things that make you better when you master them.

More challenging for me personally is keeping on top of the financial side of the business. I think I will always find quoting for work challenging – we tend to undervalue ourselves sometimes to avoid ruffling any feathers.

What different skill sets do you work with?

At Repton, I am largely a one-man band, but I do collaborate with other creatives fairly regularly. For the Capital On Tap project, apart from myself, we had a former Creative Director from a big ad firm, whose ability to generate the perfect strapline or copy was incredible. He really helped rationalise the brief using his experience of working with top decision makers in business and also knowing what the audience responds to.

I have observed in London that it’s increasingly more common for creative teams to be assembled from small independent suppliers, such as Repton, based on having a particular skill set that is specifically beneficial to a particular brief.

How does the technology you use enhance the different creative areas in your workflow?

The majority of my work is created on screen, so my laptop is absolutely essential. Since switching to a MacBook Pro, it never ceases to amaze me how reliable and fast it is to boot up. The Force Touch Trackpad is also one of the best I have used, which is handy when it comes to drawing vectors or similarly intricate tasks where a mouse was previously needed. The majority of my software is available on Adobe Creative Cloud, and I probably take it for granted how well everything works together.

On the desk that Maltin Studio kindly let me use is a 27” iMac – a screen that size allows you to feel unrestricted, so you can focus purely on the design. When not using the iMac, I like to plug in an additional monitor to the MacBook Pro, to split the menus and code editor panes from the design views.

Which creative products could you not live without?

If I was to strip it back to the absolute basics, I would start with the MacBook Pro. It is portable for meetings, while powerful and reliable enough to use every day. In terms of software, Adobe Creative Cloud is essential. It has most of the software I use under one subscription, and it has alternatives for other products that I use, such as Coda 2 or Sketch. Finally, a simple pen and paper can’t be overlooked – I can’t start the creative process without them.

How does Apple work alongside your other creative tools?

I’ve used Adobe Creative Cloud with both my old Acer laptop and the MacBook Pro, and there is no comparison in terms of performance. More than that, it is the small details like drag and drop that work so well between the different Adobe applications that the Mac handles so well. I often have many applications open at once, and this seems to be no problem for the MacBook Pro, so much so that it’s easy to neglect to shut it down and give it a rest for weeks at a time.

Do you have any productivity tips or tools that you’d recommend to other creatives?

As I said earlier, I really recommend blocking out and planning your day and committing to giving these blocks your full undivided attention. It may sound like a buzz-kill, but I tried being more gung-ho about managing projects and it just doesn’t work as well.

If you are into web design, I strongly recommend giving Adobe XD a try. It’s early days for it in terms of functionality, but just behind Sketch, it’s by far the most efficient way to design multiple-page sites. Best of all, it has an excellent prototyping feature, which will let you link up the pages to test the real site. It’s so valuable to be able to click through and test how the UX is performing, and of course it adds a thick layer of gloss for presenting the artwork to clients.

Looking forward, are there any creative or technology trends you’re excited about in 2018?

I’m interested in the emergence of responsive logos for screen use. I think it represents how businesses recognise the power of branding as an ambassador. More excitingly though, I don’t think it will be long before people are having meetings with VR headsets. Just imagine, you could choose a location, like a restaurant in Miami, and be able to look at and talk to photo-realistic renderings of each other. The Matrix is real.

Take a look at Liam’s work with Repton Creative at reptoncreative.com, and find out more about his work designing art, branding magazines and building websites.

If you’d like to find out more about any of the creative kit mentioned above, give us a call on 03332 409 204 or email DandP@Jigsaw24.com. For all the latest news, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.