Who is she and why did she need my help?
Claire runs graphic design agency West9 Design. She’s a conceptual designer working with ambitious business owners with a cause and heart behind what they do as well as academic institutions and charities.
Claire’s main focus is branding alongside creating websites, logos and marketing materials. Unsurprisingly, the visuals for her websites are amazing but she needed someone to write about the projects she’d worked on to be able to create compelling case studies for her portfolio.
Where I came into the picture
Claire found me through Doing it for the Kids and booked in for a discovery call. We had a great chat and connected over the fact that our businesses are at similar stages – we understood where each other was coming from.
After our call I sent Claire a quote for writing a series of case studies and she quickly booked in.
What happened next
Because I didn’t know that much about Claire or the way she works, the discovery deep dive phase was even more important for this project. I needed to understand more about her business, the relationship she has with her clients and the way she delivers her work to be able to capture the process in her case studies.
I also had Claire walk me through each of the projects she wanted me to write about in voice notes. When it comes to case studies, there are some details that I’ll never be able to replicate without hearing about them first-hand and these tend to come through best when clients chat me through the work in this way. In this instance it was the thoughts behind certain colour choices for projects – there’s no way this design novice would have picked up on the significance of elements like that without Claire pointing them out.
“Sam makes your work shine though copy that is in your tone and resonates to your audience. She has clear easy to follow processes and so kept my work to a minimum.”
I delivered the draft case studies and Claire identified some tweaks to ensure they totally reflected the process that had taken place. Once they were live on her website I gave them a final proofread in place – text always looks slightly different on websites from Word docs so I like to give things a final once over when they’re online.
Where that left Claire
Having someone come in with an outside perspective and none of the discomfort of singing her own praises made Claire realise that she tended to undermine and undervalue her brilliant work when summarising it for her portfolio. With my help, she is now letting potential clients know exactly how good she is at what she does!
“The case studies were great and really enhanced my visual designs. I realised quickly that I had undersold myself when doing my own (far too modest).”
Our relationship today
These case studies were the first stage of a wider website overhaul for Claire so after some planning time she came back for a quote for more case studies and new website copy which I’ve since delivered. She has used paying me to write her copy to give her a push to do the behind-the-scenes work on her website, a task that otherwise kept slipping down her to-do list.
I’m determined to meet up with Claire in person this year, I just know we’d have fun!
“Sam not only provided excellent content but was timely, good value and fun to work with.”
Find out more about Claire
If you’re looking to elevate your brand with a fresh new visual identity, take a look at Claire’s work. You can also find her on Instagram.
