49:8 Make a living designing logos

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Lee:

Welcome to the Trailblazer FM podcast. This is your host, Lee. And on today's show, we have the one, the only, it's Mr. Ian Paget. Ian, mate. How are you doing?

Ian Paget

Hey. Yeah, I'm really good. I'm so happy to be on here. We talk a lot, but I haven't actually spoken to you face to face in a while. So this is really good for me as well.

Lee:

I think we first met... Did we first physically meet at the Youprenuer Summit, wasn 't it? 

Ian Paget

We did. Yeah, in person. That's right.

Lee:

Back in the day when it was fashionable to meet up in person. So, folks, if you don't know who Ian is, he is the author of "Make a Living Designing Logos", and he's also the host of "The Logo Geek Podcast". He's also my friend and soon to be your friend. Ian, could you just give us a little bit of background about yourself?

Ian Paget

Sure. So as you mentioned, my name's Ian Paget and I'm a graphic designer. Currently, pretty much day to day, I'm working on Logo Geek, which is split down in two parts. So part of it is working with clients on logo design and other graphic design services. And then the other side of it is building a community having a podcast, and building everything around supporting other graphic designers to make a living designer logos. So hopefully that's enough of an introduction as to what I do. We can go more into that as we go into the conversation.

Lee:

Well, you are constantly creating and I was really excited. A few months ago, you shared that you were going to launch your book. You'd already written the first version and you committed online via social media to get the book finished and you kept updating us all, letting us know how far you were getting on. Then we started to see some of the example prints that you were doing. You did a few unboxing videos of how far you've gotten.

Lee:

That was so cool. If you're watching on YouTube, folks, you can see it there. If you're listening on the podcast, go and click on the link. Then you decided to do a Kickstarter, and I was blown away that within 12 hours, you met 100 % of your goal. Within 24 hours, you were at 200 % of your goal, and you are introducing some exciting new sprint... Is it sprint targets? What do.They call them?

Ian Paget

Stretch goals. Stretch goals.

Lee:

 I'm project management.

Ian Paget

I literally didn't know this until I did a Kickstarter campaign. That was the term, but yes, that's stretch goals.

Lee:

Exactly. So you're introducing all of these stretch goals. So that in itself is wonderful validation for you. But could you share with us the initial journey that led you to write the book?

Ian Paget

Sure. So it's not a short story.

Lee:

I've got a whole day.

Ian Paget

So I would say that the idea of the book started probably around 10 years ago. It's been really that long since I've had this dream of creating this specific book. But I would say that the actual seeds of doing this was when I was at college, I wanted to write a book. I literally wanted to create a book. And I can't remember exactly what sparked that. But initially, I wanted to create a fantasy illustration book story. Being a big Star Wars fan and Lord of the Rings, I always used to read these illustrated books. I wanted to do an illustrated book. It was something I was really desperate to do, was just to make a book. That didn't really progress very far, partly because I fell at the idea that I had was too big and maybe I'll visit it at some point in the future. But this idea of writing a book really stuck with me quite early on. When I started to build Logo Geek, so that started out as a hobby while I was working in a full-time graphic design position, and I got really obsessed with logo design.

Ian Paget

I really wanted to learn more. In my free time, I've always been passionate about learning some new skill that I could apply to my full-time job. Logo design was something that I started to focus on, and I started to read books and then share what I was learning on social media. And this idea of sharing what I was learning sparked this thing where I cornered myself into this position where I felt like I had to keep learning in order to share stuff. But it just turned into an absolute passion. And I just reading, literally buying every book I could find, reading every book I could find, reading every resource I could find, speaking to as many people as I could about logo design. And something I noticed was that across all of these books, there was never really one book that was perfect for what I needed. There was one little bit from this book that I found really useful. And I have a one from this one. And there was all these different things. And I had this idea, like I said, I always wanted to write a book. It's like, oh, maybe I should write a bible to logo design, like the ultimate guide to logo design in some capacity.

Ian Paget

And this was quite early on. I hadn't worked much on logo design at that point. It was more that I thought that would be a really great book and I thought I'd be a good person to write it because I was taking things I was learning and I thought I could turn that into something.

Lee:

Marrying your initial dream as a young person thinking, I would really love to write a book with your passion for the thing you are learning that you are immersing yourself in.

Ian Paget

Exactly. And then one way I thought of potentially writing this would be to write blogs. And I learned this technique from Pat Flynn. So it's quite a long time ago that he did this, but he started his YouTube channel. And his very first video, and I'm sure you can link to it in the show notes, he planned his book and he used all these different Post it notes, and he created the structure. And I did didn't really know how to write a book. I'm not somebody that's ever been particularly great at writing. I mean, being completely honest, even as a 20 year old, that's when I really started reading. Growing up through school and stuff like that, I just didn't enjoy reading. I found it really boring. It didn't particularly excite me. But as I've grown older, I've obviously learned to write through things like blogging and stuff like that. But yeah, so I applied what I learned from Pat using Post It Notes, and I found it's an absolutely fantastic way of planning a book. And I'd never heard of this way of doing it before. But basically, the idea, just to explain it to your listeners, you have this big idea in your head, and you're just full of all these ideas.

Ian Paget

And if you were to sit down and try and write that in a notepad, it would be really hard because there's just too many ideas in your head. But what you can do with the Post It Notes is you just write down a word or a phrase and then just keep going until you run out of ideas. And then you can group those into related topics. And then from those related topics, you can then start to build out chapters for your book. So you've essentially in a very short space of time. I mean, this didn't take me long at all because I had so many ideas of what I wanted to do. I had a high level overview of exactly what I wanted to do with chapters, topics, all this stuff. And then what I was thinking, I've always been really passionate about things like search engine optimization as well and ranking on Google and stuff like that. And the key part of that is writing. A great idea would be to start taking some of these topics, chapters and stuff like that and to blog. And I thought my great idea would be to basically write enough blogs that I can put them all together and release it as a book.

Ian Paget

But the reality of that was that I totally underestimated how much work a book was, because if you can imagine that a relatively small book is around 50,000 words. So in order to write enough content for a reasonably sized book or a smallish book, you'd have to write 51,000 word blogs. And if you was doing one of those every week for a year, you'd eventually get there. But the reality was that I was really struggling just to write one blog every 2-3 months, because a blog you don't get paid for, so you're more likely to be focused on client work, stuff that does immediately make an income. I got to this point where I did have to commit to it because basically every single year for God knows how many years, I made it my New Year's resolution to write my book. And it was this way for several years. It was when I eventually stepped away from my full-time position and started working for myself, I decided, no, I have to focus on this because I really need to do this. Because if I'm going to be where I want to be in terms of my career and my position in terms of offering a service, I need to release this book.

Ian Paget

It's fundamental to what I want to do. And also I feel it's something that my following want. When I first started, I didn't have that following. I didn't have those people that wanted something from me. Fast forward, 10 years, I've got this big following and people want that book. People, they want to read it. But then also from a reputation point of view, having a book is number one. I've got a podcast, I've got everything else. The one thing I don't have is a book. I got to this point where I just needed to focus and I made it a routine. I've gone way beyond your question by this point, Lee, but I can keep going if you want me to.

Lee:

No, that's fine. I love listening to the journey. And it sounds like to me, it's something you've wanted to do. Like I said earlier, you've married that dream as a child to the passion that you have. You've recognized that a book is a phenomenal calling card. It's a credibility booster. It's a business card. It's got many advantages to you. But equally, you're following want this. You've developed a great following through the Logo Geek podcast and all of your different channels. People know, like and trust you. They know you're good at what you do. Your clients also know, like and trust you, which means your community would really love to learn from your experiences. It's encouraging first to know that it's taking you this long because everybody else listening who also has a dream, who's also procrastinated for years can be encouraged that it's completely normal. But also we can be encouraged that you can actually get there and you are there. You've launched your kick starter, like I said, the book is pretty much ready to go, which is super exciting. Obviously, one of the purpose behind the kickstarters was to release the book at a really high quality instead as opposed to doing the cheaper run where people don't have that nice experience of reading the book.

Lee:

That's really exciting. So for those who do grab the book, what's the one thing you want them to take away? What is it? And I will share mine first. I have actually had the privilege of previewing your book and reading through a significant amount of it in the last several hours. I've been cramming, I'll admit. You did only send me it yesterday.

Ian Paget

I did only send it yesterday, to be fair.

Lee:

But one of the themes throughout that I could see here was that making a living from logo design requires not just design skills, but also business skills. There are many hats you're going to have to wear. You're going to have to sell the logo. You're going to have to project manage your managing tasks, et cetera. It goes way beyond just being a great artist. So that's one of the biggest takeaways that I took from that. But for yourself, what's that one big take away you'd love people to hammer home?

Ian Paget

This is a really hard question to answer, and I've been thinking about it a lot since you asked me. I think one of the things comes from when working on this book, as I mentioned to you, the original idea was to create the ultimate guide to logo design. Over the last 10 years, I've realized that that doesn't exist, and creating that book would almost be quite arrogant because that... Something that I've learned, so I've read loads of books, I've interviewed hundreds of graphic designers, and I've been fortunate to have spoken to people who I deem as the best living logo designers on the planet. And something that I've noticed is that there just isn't a single way to do this. The only thing that is consistent between everybody that's making a living designing logos is that they offer logo design, and that's the end product. How they offer that as a service is different in every scenario. Sometimes there are some similarities. How they've built their reputation is different. How they promote themselves is different. The platform that they work on is different. Something that I've tried to do with the book is share how I've made a living designing logos.

Ian Paget

The reason that I've done that is because I don't want to be telling people how to do something if I don't know if that thing actually worked or not. But what I have done is shared what's worked for me. And something that's really important is that it might not work for you, but I want it to inspire you. So in terms of a take away, really is that I want to encourage people to find their own way to learn from as many sources as they possibly can, and to take a little bit of everything to try it out, and then to become your own person and your own entity. First of all, you can reverse engineer what somebody else has done, and that's a really good way of building a business. But you will get to a point where you feel like you're not being yourself. And I know you've been through that journey.

Lee:

Yourself, Lee. Absolutely.

Ian Paget

I remember you sharing this picture of you as a business. It was quite funny to see. Booted and booted. Yeah. And now you are much more yourself. So I hope that people reading the book will be inspired.

Lee:

Yep.

Ian Paget

They will be inspired to take their own journey and to find their own way of making a living designing logos by taking lessons from what I've done and then finding their own way. So I think that's probably the biggest take away because I don't believe that there's a book like that in this space that is done in that way that's been as transparent and as honest. Most books on logo design are literally how to books or step by step books. But like I said, the only thing that's similar, that's the same between every designer is that there's a logo. At the lowest end, they're not doing any research. They're just throwing stuff out. If they do that and they're able to make a living doing it, that's cool. And then at the higher end, again, they offer a logo, but there could be whole strategists and teams of people and they need flights paying for and all this stuff. And this happens. Literally, there are like, Jamal F. Guizmo and Hab Veef. If you want to work with them, you have to pay for them to come to you and have a meeting.

Lee:

Amazing.

Ian Paget

Find your own way.

Lee:

Find your own way. Your biggest takeaway is find your own way. I love that you do share your own personal experience in the book because we can learn from people's experiences. But what we do have to recognize is that you also have your own luck because luck plays a big part, doesn't it? The connections that you've made over time and over the years. So whilst you could say, This is exactly how I built my business, feel free to follow it or be inspired by it. But remember, there are also factors in there that are completely outside of our control. It's always what frustrates me when I see YouTubers sharing the roadmap that they took to turning over several million or to getting a million followers, etc. Where part of that roadmap was they spent tens of thousands of pounds, or part of it was that they had an appearance on someone else's big, massive YouTube channel that they worked for for many years. All of these things that just are not reasonable. So they're sharing their experience and I'm thinking, Well, I can't. Replicate that. That's not a great thing.

Ian Paget

Exactly. I think that's one of the main things because I really don't think that anyone can replicate what I've done. It's so unique to me me and my own personal experiences that you cannot copy what I've done. You can't copy what anyone's done. Say if you wanted to be like Michael Bay Rue, you can't be because you wasn't taught by Massimo Fittonelli and you never will. And I don't think there's anyone, any living designer that will ever have the clout of being taught by somebody of that calibre. I'm sure there's a way. But like I said, what you can do is take lessons from all these different people. If you do reverse engineer what somebody's done, you can see what's worked for them. Try it out for yourself. So for me, one of the things that allowed me to build a reputation was using Twitter and being active on Twitter and posting daily. So somebody that copied it might be posting on Twitter, but somebody that actually takes the lessons away would be like, Okay, I'm going to try this technique on TikTok and post daily on TikTok and engage with people on TikTok.

Ian Paget

And if you did that, it will work. It always worked. Everybody that I know that has a goal and they go out on social media and they do what I've done in their own way, they are successful. It's almost like a framework that people can follow to reach that, but you have to find your own way of doing it. And I think that's the key thing.

Lee:

Absolutely. Also, you do mention in the book throughout, many of those books that you have read over the years, you actually reference those as well. So it's a case of, Here's how I did it. This is my journey. Here's a really useful book. "Burn Your Portfolio" was one of the books that was referenced in there where you were talking about business, et cetera. When people read the book, they are going to find tons more books that they can read. They really can arm themselves with all of the lessons learned by many people from around the world. Like you said, find their own way. Now, your kick starter campaign has been a huge success. I'm pretty sure that was a surprise to you. What's your secret?

Ian Paget

First of all, let's not forget that I have spent the last 10 years building a following. I've built a large Facebook community, I've built a large email list, I've built a large following on Twitter and all other social platforms. And I've been basically giving away free advice for years now through podcast, blogs, all this stuff. And I think the reason why I had that initial rush was because of that. And I think if you don't have that and you just release the kick starter, it's probably going to be quite hard. But because I had put in all that groundwork for years, I think that's the main reason why it did well. I think it's worth briefly talking about some of what I did. So my initial goal was quite, I would say, realistic. My reasoning for doing the KickStarter was that I had planned to release my book completely independently using print on demand. And although the quality is okay, when you're a graphic designer, when you spent your whole, like, half of your life reading all these different design books, it's just not on par with published books, with companies that can print out hundreds of copies and use embossing and all these fancy different things.

Ian Paget

So I just wanted to get some nicer ones printed out. And part of that was because I wanted a nice copy and for me, this goal of writing a book, I just wanted to write a book, copy done, on my shelf done. If other people want to read it, they can. But in terms of fulfilling my goal, that was a key part of it. So I worked out what's the minimum that I need to make in order to actually do this. And I realised it didn't actually need to be a crazy number. Say if I was to order 30, hypothetically, 30 copies, say, I would only need about £1000 in backing in order to do that. And I would have been happy if I reached that. But like you say, that happened really quickly. I hadn't done any groundwork for this because I just decided one evening that I should just launch this on Kickstarter.

Lee:

I love the spontaneity of it.

Ian Paget

Well, I don't have a lot of time. So half my time, I'm caring for my daughter, and then the other half of the time, I need to make money, so I'm doing client work. So I worked out the best thing will be to launch this on Kickstarter. So I just throw everything together pretty much in one evening. I did it as quickly as I could and then put it out there. And I literally went as far as just throwing it on everything that I had. So putting it in my Facebook group and tagging everyone, that means that everybody that's in the group got an alert. So that's over 10,000 people that got alerted. And then I sent out an email to my email list, which is around 10,000 again. And then I posted it out to all my social. So I really just throw it out there to so many different people. Well, I wasn't expecting it to be as quick as it was. Yeah, I think that plays a key role.

Lee:

Yeah, it's an important thing to factor in when you are launching something on Kickstarter. If you don't have that audience, if you've not got the five or 10 years behind you, then you are going to have to invest, aren't you, in some form of promotion as well. Facebook ads or something to try and build that audience or to try and attract people who may be interested in investing. Like myself, when I launched the agency transformation live event in 2018, I think it was now, a long time ago, that surprised me how quickly tickets sold for that. But that, again, was because at that point, I already had about six years behind me of podcast of building a following, etc. As we go into 2024, more and more people know about me nowadays, which is wonderful and want to come and meet other people within the community because it's slowly built up. That's definitely an important factor. Now in your book, you do look at some very famous logos. Could you share, give us a snippet from the book, a bit of a free preview and just share an interesting story about one of the logos and maybe why it's in the book?

Ian Paget

Yeah, sure. In terms of sharing famous examples, it's primarily to give context to certain things. As one example, when you are creating a logo, you need to consider that it's going to be versatile. You want to make sure that it's going to work in all different situations, from large sizes, small sizes, single color, black, white, all this stuff. And there is this weird thing that can happen sometimes where you just decide that you want your nice logo to be in white as an example. If you were to just take your logo in some situations, for example, I used the Premier League lion as an example. If you were just to invert the colour of that, it looks wrong. And it's a little bit like, and your younger listeners won't know what I'm talking about here, but you know when we used to take photos and use the film and you'd have the... When you flip Premier League logo, it looks like that. It just looks wrong. The eyes that should be black are suddenly white and it just looks strange. So what you have to do in those scenarios is essentially redesign the logo or adapt and modify that logo to look right when it's inverted.

Ian Paget

And the average Joe won't even notice this because they just see it as looking like the same thing. But if you were to look at the Premier League logo when it's in white, it's slightly different. They've essentially created an outline to that in order to ensure its versatility. So in terms of using famous logos within my book, it's to illustrate and explain a technical part of constructing a logo.

Lee:

It's also helpful, though, isn't it, to look at other people's logos, not as comparison with regards to, Oh, well, they're much better than me because that will make you feel rubbish. But to learn those lessons.

Ian Paget

Something that I try to do with looking at other work, I think it's really important to have benchmark work. When you look around on social media, it can make you feel rubbish that you're not good enough. But actually, I find it really helpful to have something that you can look to where you want to be. So for me, it's looking at work by agencies like pentagram or. And I got really nice books from them. And I look through them sometimes and think, Okay, I need to keep working to be able to produce work that's to this standard. And I feel I can get in there now. I mean, it's taken me a long time. I do feel like there's some logos that I've done where I would happily put it aside some of the work that they've done.

Lee:

That's a great mindset, though. That's the important thing. Your mindset there is for improving yourself. So you're looking at the next level. You're looking at the bars that other people have set. You're recognising that maybe you're not quite there, but you're aspiring to be there therefore you're pushing towards it. I think quite commonly, I mean, I used to do this in web design myself, I'd look at so many other web developers and how amazing their sites were and the great animations and that, but I'd look through it in the wrong lens. Instead of looking at that as an aspirational goal, I would look at that to put myself down and maybe not bid on projects and not push myself anymore because I would doubt myself. I'm happy to say I have like you, flipped that script now. And nowadays, that's the aspiration I want to self improve. I want to get there. But I think it's all too common to put ourselves down.

Ian Paget

Oh, yeah. I mean, everyone does. I do it as well. Yeah, all the time.

Lee:

Well, as we come into land mate, other than obviously buying your book, if somebody really does want to just focus all in on logo design and start their own business, what's the first step that they should take?

Ian Paget

First of all, you need to be able to design logos.

Lee:

Let's assume they can.

Ian Paget

Yeah. So if we assume that they can. So as a designer, there are a few things that are your most important assets. One of them is your portfolio and the other one is your reputation. And in order to be able to make a living doing this, these are two things that you need to continually work on. And being entirely transparent, part of writing this book is also to help to build my reputation. And I've been transparent with that in the book as well. Basically, you need to show your work and to get out there and to build your reputation. Your first client will come from your current network, work. So if you are dabbling with logo design, make sure that everybody that you know knows. So if you haven't already done it, maybe post on social media that you're planning to do this. And when you have a conversation with somebody, mention that that's what you do. Don't mention it all the time.

Lee:

As you would.

Ian Paget

The idea is make sure as many people as possible knows what you do. And that's essentially what marketing is. It's just making as many people know what you do. One of the key things for me that's really allowed me to attract clients has been to build a website and to build a social following. If you don't already have somewhere online where you have some portfolio, I would recommend to build something, but to not be too cut up on it being perfect. So if you don't have a website already, literally sit down and throw one together as quickly as you can. I mean, say if you got an hour or two, see what you can do in an hour or two and just try and finish it. So for example, it could just be a single page website with your name at the top with a couple of different examples and some contact details at the bottom. And whats really great about websites is that it's not setting stone and you can continually build on it. So for example, if you were just to sit down and throw something together, you can start sharing people, so you can start sharing that.

Ian Paget

But every time you get 15 minutes here, half an hour there, you can say, add an extra image, or add an extra page, or add an extra paragraph of content. And if you do this every time, you get that 15 minutes, half an hour, this builds up over time. This is literally what I've been doing. I've just been gradually doing these things. And when somebody looks at what I've done now, they're like, Oh, my God. You've got podcast, you got a book, you got this. It looks huge, but that's really come from doing incremental things every day for years. But when you work for a company, this just absorbs into everything else. You don't really see what you do. But when you work for yourself, that paragraph that wasn't done yesterday and now it's done today, that will always be there forever and all eternity. When you do another paragraph, you've now got two paragraphs on your website. Ten days later, you got ten paragraphs. It's really the compound effect. As you do more, you share more, you tell more people, that's when you suddenly get an opportunity that wasn't there previously. Then that opens up another door and you really get this compound effect and everything is just...

Ian Paget

This is reputation. Reputation grows through continually doing something. It's just incredible what can happen when you remain focused on a goal and you just actively do stuff towards it. So hopefully that's a bit of advice.

Lee:

Great advice. If you're starting out, assuming you can design, start off with your portfolio, build your reputation, start telling people what you do, build a one page landing page site to promote that, and then slowly but surely work away at your business one day at a time, a paragraph at a time, an action and activity at a time. Because like I always say on the podcast, small achievable actions lead to big change. And eventually, whether it takes five years or 10 years to become an overnight success, you certainly will. I love that phrase when people say, hey, look, they're an overnight success, and they forget to mention the 10 years of building the YouTube channel or whatever it is that person was doing. Folks, you can find the book over on the KickStarter campaign. There should be a few days left here as this episode goes out. The thing I like what you said is I love books myself, so I've got loads. This is a leather bound Bible. It cost me quite a lot of money. I'm a paper smeller, so it smells amazing. I can't wait to get your book in my hands because I know it's going to be high quality.

Lee:

I love the embossing and everything else that I believe will be there. Really excited. But folks, if you'd like to support the Kick starter campaign, can I encourage you, go ahead. If you're watching on YouTube, there is a link in the description. If you're listening on the podcast, head on over to Trailblazer.fm and check out the episode show notes and click on the link to support the Kick starter campaign. And if you're watching in the distant future when this book is a best seller. I'm sure we'll update the link so you can go and find where to purchase the book. So, Ian, thanks so much for your time today. Thanks for hanging out with us. We're really excited to see what happens in the future with your book and with your brand. So before we go, what is the best way to connect with you? And then we shall say goodbye.

Ian Paget

In terms of connecting with me, I'm LogoGeek on everything. So I'm most active currently on Twitter and Threads. So find LogoGeek and I'll be there.

Lee:

Twitter and threads is where it's at. I will make sure those links are in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. All the best with the book and take care.

Ian Paget

Cheers. Thank you. Thank you. Bye. Bye. You.