Sticky Notes with CJ Cawley and Jack Chitty

This week, we’re doing something a little different.
No big topic or case study. Just an honest conversation about why running a creative business feels really hard sometimes.
We’ve both had a few turbulent weeks recently, so we wanted to go properly behind the curtain and talk about the stuff that doesn’t normally make it onto Instagram: unpaid invoices, difficult client conversations, financial pressure, changing expectations around AI, slower leads and the constant pressure of having to go out and earn every single pound again next month.

This week, we’re going behind the scenes of one of CJ’s favourite brand identity projects to date: the complete rebrand of Mike Lane.

Mike has spent the last 10 years building an incredible business creating highly detailed modifications for scale models inspired by films like Back to the Future, Batman, Jaws, Terminator and Fast & Furious.

But after a decade of growth, the brand had outgrown the handwritten signature logo Mike had created himself.The challenge was to take something incredibly personal, handmade and full of passion, and evolve it into a brand that felt more established, engineered and trustworthy, without losing the personality that made people love Mike Lane in the first place.

This week, we’re doing something a little different and playing a game of Would You Rather: graphic design edition. Some of the questions are stupid. Some get surprisingly deep. And a few reveal far more about how we think as designers than either of us probably expected.

This week, we're getting into the uncomfortable conversation you have to have with yourself when promoting your business on social media. The line between marketing yourself as a designer and becoming a design influencer.

This week, we’re talking about the red flags we look for before agreeing to work with a new design client.
Finding clients is one thing. Finding the right clients... well that's a whole other story.
After years of working freelance, running our own studios and making plenty of mistakes along the way, we’ve both developed a pretty good radar for the little signs that can tell you whether a project is going to be brilliant… or an absolute nightmare.