If you've come to me for Google Ads or SEO, the chances are you're thinking about traffic, rankings and how many enquiries are coming through, and that's what I want to be thinking about too. However, once I start digging into an account or a website, the thing holding it back sometimes turns out to be a landing page that doesn't look like it belongs to the business, a brand that feels dated next to the competition or ad creative that was put together in a rush. I can't fix any of that with keywords or bids, so that's when you need a designer.
When a project needs design I bring in Kelly Thake at Kreative Freedom. Kelly was the senior designer at an agency I worked at before either of us went freelance, and these days she runs her own design business, so she's who I go to whenever a client needs a proper designer on their project.
How I Know Kelly
Her full background is on the about page on the Kreative Freedom site, but the short version is that she has a BA (Hons) in Graphic Design from Norwich University of the Arts and worked her way up to Senior Designer at marketing agencies, where she managed the creative department, before going freelance and setting up Kreative Freedom.
More than that, I've worked alongside her day to day, so I know the standard of work she produces and how she works with the rest of a team, which is the bit a portfolio can't really show you. Working in small, fast-paced agencies you find out pretty quickly who listens to a brief properly and who's happy to talk things through with the SEO or PPC person on the project, and that's a big part of why I'm comfortable putting my name next to hers when a client asks me who they should use for design.
What Kreative Freedom Does
Going by the services listed on the Kreative Freedom homepage, the design work Kreative Freedom offers includes:
- Brand development
- Website design
- Design for print
- Exhibition design
- Presentation design
- Digital and social media design
- Video and animation
- Agency support
Kelly works with businesses from startups through to large companies, and Kreative Freedom has some trusted freelancers so it can scale up or down depending on the size of the project. That's similar to how I like to work, keeping things flexible to what the project actually needs.
Kreative Freedom's view is that an idea should lead the aesthetic rather than the other way around, and the work is research-led, so the concepts come out of insight into the people you're trying to reach before anyone worries about the look. That's how I'd want a designer on one of my projects to work, as it's much the same way I think about SEO and ads, and a page can look great and still do very little for your enquiries or sales if it doesn't speak to the people landing on it.
Where Design and My Work Meet
As you'll see on my services page, my side of things is SEO, Google Ads, GA4 and GTM tracking and the reporting that pulls it all together. I'm not a designer though, and I'd much rather be upfront about that than have a go at your brand myself.
In practice the two overlap quite a lot. Landing pages are the obvious one, because with Google Ads you're paying for every click, and if the page someone lands on doesn't look trustworthy or makes it hard to find the next step then there's a good chance they'll head back to the search results and click on a competitor. A new website design is another, as the layout, the page structure and where the content sits all have a knock-on effect on SEO, and the forms and buttons are what I'll end up tracking in GA4 once it's live. Then there's ad and social creative, where a designer's eye makes a real difference to whether someone stops scrolling long enough to notice you.
What I try to do is make sure the designer and I are talking to each other from the start. If a site gets designed without anyone thinking about search or tracking, it can mean going back afterwards to rework headings and page templates or bolt tracking onto buttons that weren't set up for it, which is time and budget that could have gone elsewhere. With Kelly on the design and me looking after the digital side, those things get thought about while the pages are still being planned, so the site's ready for search and tracking from the day it goes live.
What This Means for You
If you come to me for SEO, Google Ads or tracking and it turns out the real gap is design, I'll tell you and introduce you to Kelly, and if design is all you need then I'll just point you straight to her. You deal with her directly for the design and with me for the digital side, so you're always talking to the people doing the work and there's no account manager in the middle passing messages back and forth.
She's one of a small number of specialists I'm happy to recommend, along with SWOT for social media, Uncommon Sense for CRM and email and Connor at Motion Wave Digital for brand strategy.
If it's the digital side you need a hand with, whether that's SEO, Google Ads or getting your tracking sorted, then drop me a message and we can set up a chat about what you're looking to achieve. If it's design you're after, you can go straight to Kelly through the Kreative Freedom contact page and talk to her about your project.
