Turning Lockdown into Luck in Wiltshire, England with Kaye Huett

Michael Thomas

Michael Thomas

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Kaye Huett has loved designing, whether it was making pixel designs in Microsoft Paint or building websites for friends to showcase their illustrations and artwork in her youth, but it wasn’t until she began taking a graphic design course at her local college that she learned designing could be a full-time job. After graduating art school with her degree in Graphic Design, she cut her teeth working with an agency and clients on things like artwork, prototyping, brand identify, and taking the digital and transforming it to print. 

But 7 years in, something happened to this boss-lady! After 7 years working for a design agency, she found herself at a place in life where she wanted change. She wanted to do it her way and work with other kick-ass boss ladies! Gifted with a high visual acuity for typographies, a love of pastel palettes, BOHO vibes, and her chic pajamas, she launched her own agency in beautiful Wiltshire, England and began making magic. (If you don’t know, that’s also where Stonehenge is!) 

Her Challenge

Becoming a successful freelancer is no easy task. For years, Kaye knew she wanted to be a freelancer but was too scared to make that jump. There’s a lot of risk. For starters, she couldn’t do that and continue to work for the design firm with whom she was employed. However, her mind never ventured far from her goal. She saved, planned, designed, inevitably redesigned, and with her family’s love and support she took that first step. She knew she was ready to put the work into making this work and that it would be worth it. 

Putting it all on the line, Kaye’s design agency was born. 

Her Solution

As a designer, Kaye’s job isn’t just to create something that her clients love, but also something that resonates with the client, bringing out emotions that align with the vision the client has, bringing heart to the design. But Kaye needed to focus her offerings. As a talented designer familiar with the many areas of design, from digital projects, like social media graphics and coding + designing websites, to print projects, such as advertisements, posters, and packaging, Kaye needed to find her niche. Offering all of these services to all of her clients is just too much to manage with a one-woman show…. (at least, for now 😉)

After a lot of trial and error, Kaye discovered her best talents reside in creating logos and identities for small, mostly female-run, businesses. To promote her business, she joined like minded Facebook groups like Societygal and The Creative Gal Gang, as well as small business oriented groups for her local area, interacted with regular people like a normal person, not a spammy “BUY LOGOS FROM ME NOW!” person, and showcased her work on sites like Dribble and Instagram. 

Her Results

Kaye’s plan in motion, she soon went from having just a few clients to booking out months in advance. Success, it seems, had found Kaye! Currently, Kaye is booked out thru the end of 2020, amazing! “With the onset of lockdown, I actually found myself busier than ever (lots of people starting their own businesses it seems, which is fantastic) so I’ve been regularly booked out and working my magic with lots of small businesses over the past few months.”, said Kaye when I asked her what she had been up to lately. 

Having found ChemiCloud after her previous hosting company was acquired and began to show some signs of failure with her and client sites going down at random intervals, along with an extended back and forth with the same host telling her a variety of reasons why these outages kept happening, including that “nothing was wrong despite having the issue happening right in front of me”, Kaye noted when I asked her how she found us. She took this as a sign of things to come and decided to find a new web host, taking to Twitter and Facebook for recommendations.

They [ChemiCloud] transferred everything with ease and no downtime, my site is almost never down (I don’t think I’ve noticed it down at all since I moved to ChemiCloud a few years ago) and the support is second-to-none; there’s always someone around and my issues are always dealt with swiftly and professionally.” said Kaye when interviewed about her experiences with us so far. 

While I can’t say the key to Kaye’s success lies in ChemiCloud hosting on it’s own. Her talent is without question and her taste in typography and color are some of the best I have personally seen. She also has another secret up her sleeve that has allowed her to secure even more bookings – she stopped offering her clients options, and something amazing happened. You can read more about it on Kaye’s blog, but suffice to say, this is a most interesting take on presenting a possible final design to a client, but I cannot deny it works! 

Q&A With Kaye Huett

Many of our readers are designers, writers, and people full of imaginative passion wanting to know more about taking those first steps online and putting their work out there. While interviewing Kaye, I was able to ask some questions that many of those same people will find insightful. 

Your website – kaye.hu/ett – it’s very personal and creative! I love the colors and the calming feel. Did you code this yourself, or is it running on a CMS of sorts?

Thank you! I absolutely love to code so my website is built entirely from scratch, no CMS whatsoever. Websites for me are a very personal thing, something I love to work on, but only for myself because I’m constantly experimenting with different scripts and designs.

What do you think is the most important thing companies (tend to) forget when creating their brand?

I think one of the biggest things not only companies, but even I as a designer, have to remind myself is that we are designing and marketing to the audience and not to ourselves. It’s easy to know what you like, but it needs to be about what the consumer is going to be drawn to.

What do you think the next design trend will be? Whether it’s for print and packaging design, or design on the web for digital content.

I would say gradients but actually we’re in the midst of the gradient trend right now (especially with the introduction of freeform gradients in Illustrator recently, I know my gradients have reached another level using that tool), but I’d say using technical lines/drawings in design, as well as fonts inspired by coding, such as fira mono and courier.

What’s your favorite Pantone color?

pantoneColour is a huge part of the process when designing brands for clients, and with trends forever changing, I just couldn’t choose one. However, I’d say one of my favourites right at this minute is PANTONE 2705 C but who knows for how long!

What is the next big project you’re looking to bring to life?

I have plenty of branding jobs booked in from now until Christmas but I’m probably most excited about a wonderful client I have coming up who is a huge YouTuber; she loves colour and found me via my ‘Kaye does logos’ graphic on Pinterest and I believe when we get to work together, there’s just going to be an explosion of colour in whatever project we end up working together on.

Big thanks to Kaye for taking time from her busy schedule to speak with ChemiCloud and answer our questions. Fun story, when we initially reached out to Kaye her website was a totally different design and when she replied, we had to make sure the person who replied to our interview questions was really Kaye. The new design was so different, so calming, simply splendid. 

If you find yourself in need of a designer who cares, listens, and creates phenomenal work – definitely reach out to Kaye. But do bear in mind, she’s booked thru 2020! 

If you enjoyed this interview, then you’ll love ChemiCloud’s hosting platform. We run our services on top-notch technology and take support seriously. Check out our plans!

Kaye also shared with us some work she’s done, including the logo which caught the attention of the YouTuber she’s so very much looking forward to collaborating with. We can’t wait to see the result of that Kaye, keep in touch! 

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