I have only wonderful memories of growing up. My brother, Chris Martin, and I were always playing outside and being taken on adventures with Mum and Dad, often with a group of friends and their parents. Holidays were all about the outdoors: camping and adventures in the woods, making bows and arrows out of branches, and bracken dens to shelter from the cold weather. These also doubled up as fantastic hiding places for a game of hide and seek.

This period in my life, I see now, was a great driving force for my creativity. All of those hours spent outside exploring and making something from nothing were awesome. I can take this bracken and make shelter; I can take this branch and make a weapon. Something can easily be created if you use your imagination.

This is why I still love the outdoors and have the imagination of a six year old. This was a time of discovery, endless opportunities, and creativity. As we get older, we are taught to be more responsible and grow up, and in most scenarios, this is the right thing to do. I’ve always viewed it differently (my dad constantly reminds me that I live on a different planet) because I still carry that sense of adventure that allows me to think a little differently. I don’t fear being wrong; I fear not trying something.

“
THEY TAUGHT ME TO HUSTLE BEFORE IT WAS A SOCIAL MEDIA HASHTAG.
”

A strong work ethic is another key attribute I learned from a young age. Each weekday, Mum would pick me and my brother up from school and then go pick up Dad from work. If my Mum was working, then Dad would pick us all up. They both worked all the hours that the day gave them. Mum, a nurse, often worked nights, and Dad traveled to dangerous parts of the world for work to make money for our family. That work ethic didn’t exclude me and my brother. On weekends we would not be allowed to sit in front of the television; we would be asked to help in the garden, rake the leaves, or push around the wheelbarrow.

Obviously, we hated these chores as kids, but my parents taught us a valuable lesson: rest and watching TV were rewards for effort. The weird thing is that now I struggle to sit and watch TV. I greatly prefer finding jobs to do in the garden. They taught me how to hustle before it was a social media hashtag. Thanks, Mum and Dad. Love ya.

I was extremely lucky with my education. I was not the brightest student, but I loved the social side to school and all the activities and sports. The one thing I miss from school in my day-to-day routine today is that team player mentality. I loved being a part of a team and how everyone had each other’s back on the rugby field. This is why I still play cricket, maybe not as well as I used to and often after a beer. But I still love the competition, camaraderie, and the idea that you’re a part of something.

This is also why I hold the creative community so dear to me now. This community is passionate, positive, and it pushes me forward. Most people who write books like this do it once they have retired and their thoughts are based on a world from twenty years ago. The fact that I am writing this book while “in the trenches” with this community gives me a sense of responsibility to tell them the honest truth about the day-to-day running of a design business.

I especially enjoyed art and design lessons in school. I was not the best student by a long shot, but whenever I walked into that classroom it felt like a safe space, a place where I could be on an even footing with my friends and classmates. This was one class where I didn’t need to hide in the back. Then something happened to me that would change my life forever.

At the age of eleven, I was sexually abused by one of my teachers. Looking back on this moment with slightly wiser eyes, the experience changed my whole life’s trajectory in an instant. I don’t want to dwell too much on this one incident, because I don’t want to give him any more of my time—he has taken away far too much of that. The reason I share this with you is because it’s something real that happened in my life and contributed to the person I am today.

Throughout your life you will encounter hurdles and stumbling blocks. Some may feel impossible to get over, but I promise you that with time they do get better, or more often you find a way to deal with them in a more positive manner. It took me almost seven years before I told anybody about what happened.

This incident changed everything for me. I no longer respected any sort of authority, which made me fall out with my parents, ignore all my teachers at school, and I lost a ot of friends who always had my back. I thought the world was against me and I needed to shut everyone out to feel safe. As a result, I developed a drug problem from the age of about sixteen, which subsequently got me expelled from school for theft and drugrelated problems.

My life began with so much promise—I was enrolled at great schools and had endless opportunities—but it ended in no A levels (required exams that would allow me to attend university), no direction, and no clue. At age seventeen, I went off the rails and left home to start my own life away from it all. I’ll never use what happened to me as an excuse for the way I behaved; we all deal with stuff differently.

I rebelled big time. I went from a privately educated sports captain to a dropout and waste of space within a couple of years. I try to forget these years, but I also use them as learning tools every day.

It took me a few years to find what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. After getting kicked out of school and leaving home, I was pretty much starting from nothing, which meant I could be whatever I wanted to be. Unfortunately, I took great advantage of this. I found jobs to pay for my rent and support my drug and partying habits—not a sustainable or clever use of time.

After two years of this I finally woke up, both physically and mentally. The cliché of waking up one day and changing my life was exactly what happened. I woke up one morning and said to myself, “What the hell am I doing with my life?” I knew the answer and I had to change it.

Art and creativity were the only things I enjoyed enough to pursue. It was a way for me to kick-start my life again. I never knew it would lead me here, but I knew I needed to do something to get me out of a rut. A few days later I enrolled in the local college to do a yearlong art foundation course, learning about everything from fine arts to sculpture and textiles to graphic design, and this is when my life restarted. I had focus, I had a plan, and more importantly, I was starting to find myself again. I quickly became that little kid again, playing in the woods and leading my rugby team to success. I started to enjoy waking up again. After completing the art foundation course, my tutor mentioned that I should consider graphic design as a possible career path. I had no clue what this was at the time but thought, “Why not give it a go?” I had nothing to lose.

While continuing my design education to earn a two-year higher national diploma in graphic design, I also dipped my toe into other bits and bobs, like teaching art for a year and completing a tattoo apprenticeship under the artist who created my tattoos at the time. I felt a spark for my love of drawing again and I got into illustration and art, creating daily doodles of crazy characters in my sketchbook. The process of creating was back in my life, and I loved it.

My love of teaching has always been a part of me, but I felt the timing wasn’t right—I was still trying to figure myself out, so how could I teach others? I continued with the graphic design direction and now, fifteen years later, I’m writing this book about logo design and my crazy creative journey. Weird how things have worked out.

While at university I decided to get some work experience, so I would literally knock on design studio doors and ask if they had any open positions. Although it wasn’t a successful tactic, the fact that I tried made me certain that this was what I wanted to do.

One day while I was working in a local café, a customer who knew I wanted to be a designer approached me. His friend ran a small design agency, and they were looking for new designers to join the team. You may think that’s luck, but I call it years of hard work trying to get my life back. Let’s call it a lucky reward for the effort.

In my last year of university, I started working at a company called Irelish Media. I did everything from making tea and coffee to web design, Photoshop, using Flash to create animation, and general graphic design work. Although I was not great at any of it, I was learning so many new aspects of design, and the job allowed me to start to understand the industry.

This was a massive eye-opener for me. Before starting at the agency in 2005, I was just a creative—with a pick-up-a-pencil-and-draw kind of attitude. Everything changed when I started applying creativity toward work for other people. There was suddenly a little more pressure to perform.

One of the takeaways from my years working in an agency was being able to observe how the business was run. By the time I left, I gained a huge amount of experience in the day-to-day running of a real agency, in the real world, and doing real work for real clients.

I saw what worked and what didn’t, I learned how to structure a meeting, how to sell ideas, how to listen to a client’s feedback, the process of pricing projects, how to liaise and communicate with clients, and the importance of building relationships with other industry professionals such as printers and sign writers.

The biggest win from all of this was meeting my friend, and now business partner, Ady, lead designer at the time. When the company we were working for was winding down to close, we decided to start our own little agency and see if we could make it by ourselves.

Ady and I realized that with our joint knowledge we could make it work. We knew what to do and how to do it, and by this stage I was not as inexperienced as I once was. The knowledge you gain in an agency will stay with you for life. Being a creative is not enough—you have to know how to turn that creativity into a business that thrives. That’s the real trick.

Baby Giant—my beautiful oxymoron.

Before my company Baby Giant Design Co. was even an idea, I was interviewing with other agencies and not getting very far. During one interview I received some of the best feedback that still lives with me to this day. As the interviewer looked through my portfolio he said, “James, in terms of illustration and creativity you are an eight out of ten. In terms of websites you are a three out of ten. Ditch the web stuff and concentrate on being a creative.”

At first, I was struck by his brutal honesty, but after pondering it for a few days I realized he was right. My web stuff was awful, and at the same time I also hated doing it. I grew up in an era where I thought being a full-stack designer would be beneficial—the classic jack-of-all-trades and master of none. This interviewer’s words made me understand that it was more beneficial to be brilliant at one thing than average at many.

After going on a couple of interviews I started to think about creating something of my own. I loved the idea of working for myself but worried I wouldn’t have the security of an agency job that came with regular pay and a steady stream of work. It took a friend to say, “Don’t be an idiot, you should do it” for Ady and me to commit and start this little adventure—thanks for the advice, Phil Owen (Phil happens to be my father-in-law).

When you start any business you always hope for the best and expect the worst. In 2010, the BGCO adventure started. It wasn’t easy. Ady and I managed to scrape a few clients together, but it was tough to gain any real traction in the beginning.

Sometimes we’d do free logo work to earn other work the client would offer. We were trying to get our foot in the door with any company we could; we knew that once we were in, we’d need to seriously mess up to get booted back out. The odd bit of free work was a great way to get a client to trust us.

To keep busy we started new ventures (T-shirt and notebook companies) and anything else we thought we could make a quick buck on. These projects kept us busy, but none of these ever came to anything. We never made much money because we didn’t give them the time and effort they needed.

We also spent a lot of time making sure our identity and messaging was cohesive, and we worked on our website and brand constantly to make sure we were aligning ourselves with the clients we wanted to attract.

The business started to change circa 2015. The company was five years old, and momentum was picking up. We had some representation of our work out in the world and that was a great advertising tool. The business began to get a lot of referrals, so we didn’t have to pitch for any work. The work evolved from little bits and bobs to bigger and better projects. All that effort we put in to survive in the early years was starting to pay off.

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TODAY, BGCO CONTINUES TO GROW YEAR AFTER YEAR, AND WE HAVE EVEN INVESTED IN OTHER COMPANIES AS SHAREHOLDERS AND PARTNERS. IT’S BEEN A TOUGH, AWESOME, EMOTIONAL, CRAZY, AND INSPIRING JOURNEY SO FAR, AND WE’RE JUST GETTING STARTED. I WOULDN’T CHANGE ANY OF IT.
”

Baby Giant was my baby, so creating a personal brand was never in the game plan. I’m not sure what made me change my Instagram handle from @jamalicious to @made.by.james, but I suppose it was when I decided to take my work a little more seriously that I came up with a more apt name.

I thought sharing my creative process would be a fascinating thing to see. I was always super intrigued by the work of other designers, but you rarely ever get behind the scenes to see how that work is done. My natural inclination to always be a little different from everyone else probably made me rebel against this norm, so I started sharing more and more on social media how I came up with my ideas. Made by James, and the community that has developed around it, has become something much bigger than I could have ever imagined.

Although this sharing was never planned, I do have some advice on building a community of awesome humans, or My Team, as I like to call them. These are all the people who engage with me.

THE FOUR MAIN RULES BY WHICH I GOVERN MYSELF ARE:

CONSISTENCY

HONESTY

AUTHENTICITY

VULNERABILITY

Those who follow me on social media know that these words lead my everyday interactions. I don’t pretend to be someone I’m not, and I share my real life with people, even when it’s really freaking tough.

My message for anyone interested in starting a personal brand is to show the good and the bad of yourself. People are looking for authenticity, and that genuineness makes you relatable and human. People want to work with people.

The best things to come out of this journey are the people I get to meet and the collaborations I get to work on. Growing up, my dream was to one day be as cool as the dudes over at Lincoln Design Co., who for me are the pinnacle of everything cool in the design world, creating the best work for the best clients, and all done in their own unique style. When I started BGCO, Lincoln Design Co. was a massive source of inspiration. Not only have I now worked with Dan Lincoln and his team on developing my own brand assets for Made by James, but I now get to call them my friends. That’s not something I thought would ever happen.

I have no idea what the future holds, but I know that I’ll never stop showing up for you, and I will always bring a little bit of real into a world that mostly likes to hide it. I know what my mission is: to help the creatives of this world become whatever they want to be, and to help them find their own voice in a very noisy industry. Although I’m now a logo designer by trade, the information in this book relates to design and creativity as a whole and there’s something relatable for everyone.