Go with your gut - Lettering Artist Julia Broughton
Julia spent 8 years designing greetings cards in-house at Hallmark and Moonpig before she was “forced into freelancing”. Turning away on-the-side gigs that she just couldn’t fit in around full-time work, Julia realised she was losing money.
She went freelance full-time, securing guaranteed work from her former employer for the first year, and continued to teach the calligraphy classes that were helping her get her name out there. She niched from illustration to lettering, rebranding her entire business, and she’s now busy building up multiple income streams.
She chats to Steve about the different avenues she’s exploring, how she finds work and builds relationships with art directors, and what her big goals for the future are.
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Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with technical copywriter John Espirian and Steve Folland
Steve Folland: How about we get started hearing how you got started being freelance?
Julia Broughton: My journey with freelance, it's been intertwined with my journey with lettering. I used to be an in-house designer for a greetings card company. I started at Hallmark way back when and then I went on to work for Moonpig. I discovered lettering whilst doing my job there. I became more and more interested in it. My boss was always trying to force me away from the computer because I was heavily into using Illustrator, vectors and all that sort of thing. Lettering seemed to be the thing that got me into the real world.
Julia Broughton: One fateful day in 2014, I think it was, I took a calligraphy class and I just discovered my thing. I instantly knew that was what I was supposed to be doing with my life. It took over all my work at work. Eventually, I started teaching on the side of work and getting commissions on the side of work. Eventually, I was just forced into being freelance because I'd literally go to work and lose money by having to give up calligraphy opportunities.
Julia Broughton: I always assumed I would end up as a freelancer because being in the greetings card industry, it's quite niche. I didn't really see anywhere for me to go outside of it. I'm not an officially trained graphic designer so I thought my income would probably be limited by staying in that industry. I saw freelance as a way to be a bit more varied in how I bring in money. The possibilities are endless really. It just all happened a bit sooner than I assumed it would, which is great.
Steve Folland: Wow. While you were still working there and were starting to get commissions, how were you marketing yourself? Did you have a freelancer website? What were you doing?
Julia Broughton: I did have a website for a very long time. It probably actually wasn't a very long time, but it felt it. I was actually Illustration by Julia because I thought I would end up being an illustrator. I had this website with a load of characters and things that I'd designed through work and eventually more and more lettering started creeping on. But, to be honest, all the work came through teaching. It got my name out there. The company I was teaching with, Quill London, they would send me out to events and all sorts of things. That's how it was generated rather than by my website.
Julia Broughton: Once I decided to actually go freelance and make lettering my thing, I changed myself to Letters by Julia, rebranded everything, started the new website that was literally nothing but lettering and then it started snowballing from there. It has mainly been word of mouth and getting myself out there that's gotten me work rather than a website. That's just something I've pointed people to.
Steve Folland: Word of mouth. How has that word of mouth spread?
Julia Broughton: Quite a lot via social media. When I used to teach calligraphy... I'm going back to it now. For a few years there people would come to my classes. Say a friend was having a wedding, back when I used to do wedding work, and say, "I learn calligraphy with this great," hopefully, "calligrapher. You should give her a ring." Or I'd get the work via Quill. Just that thing or people would find me via Instagram. I've got a few things via Instagram. When I started being seriously freelance, I sent out loads of postcards in the posts so I could do nice calligraphy envelopes and really impress art directors rather than just sending off emails. That's how I've got a lot of my commercial clients nowadays by going old school.
Steve Folland: Your commercial clients have come from sending hard stuff in the post-
Julia Broughton: Yes.
Steve Folland: ... to art directors at magazines or advertising agencies?
Julia Broughton: I use LinkedIn to search out art directors from various publishers and magazines. Or I'll go into WHSmith and look in the inside cover of a magazine, because all the art directors and marketing people are listed. I write down their names, then I do a little snooping on the internet to find addresses and then just send postcards of my work out into the world. It's actually worked really well. I've managed to get both Penguin, Random House and Walker Books as quite repeat clients via the postcards. People, if they like it, it's quite nice having an envelope addressed in calligraphy, and getting all these things, so people show it around the office. I'll work with multiple teams within the same company. So word spreads for me once I send work out into the world.
Steve Folland: That's so nice. Do you customize what you send to people?
Julia Broughton: Yeah. I have a set of the same postcards, but I'll pick and choose which ones are suitable for each client. Say I'm sending them to a food magazine, anything I've got to do with food, because I like food, I write about it a lot, I'll make sure to send them that content. Then I include a letter that's personalized to each person with the postcards. I don't want to just send out random, "Here art director. Here's some stuff." I want to address the person by name, mention their company, maybe a piece of work they've put out into the world that I like. I don't want to just be generic about it. I want them to see that I actually do want to work with them. I'm not just begging for work.
Steve Folland: You do that in your beautiful script, do you?
Julia Broughton: No, that's actually a typed letter because that would take me forever! It's all branded though.
Steve Folland: Good, so any of us can do that. Phew!
Julia Broughton: Yes. Steve Folland: It sounded like you started running as it were because you were already, as you said, losing money by going into a full-time job. How long did it take you to feel comfortable with a regular stream of work coming in?
Julia Broughton: I always feel in a way that I cheated when I started freelance, even though I didn't, I was just being business smart. When I decided to leave my job, I went to Quill, I was already teaching on the side with them, but I said, "To keep me going, if I do go freelance, I'll need this amount of classes per month. Is that something you can do?" They said, "Yeah, great, do it." On the other side, when I left Moonpig, I had lots of ranges that were their best sellers. So I used my leverage to say, "I need to leave but can you give me guaranteed freelance work each month?" My boss at the time agreed. Just for the first year I had a set amount of days that I would freelance for Moonpig and a set amount of classes that I would do for Quill.
Julia Broughton: That led to me being quite successful for my first year of freelance. When that all ended, the second year, it was a little bit tougher because unfortunately that kept me so busy, I had maybe neglected finding other clients a little bit. I did have other work, but I don't think I was quite as... I should have done a bit more. The second year was a bit of a scramble to find other clients, which is fine. It all worked out fine because I still do the odd bit of freelance for Moonpig.
Julia Broughton: I also started myself as a greetings card publisher in my own right. So now I design cards under the Letters by Julia band and then I currently license them to Moonpig. Say it's Christmas. I'll give them a selection of Christmas cards to choose from. They'll pick which ones they like, they'll adapt them to make them usable on their website. Then when they're sold, I earn a royalty. As I get more and more cards on the site that's building up.
Julia Broughton: The second year and third year, which I'm now in, I'm gaining more money from that. It's becoming more of a cornerstone of my business that I'm going to be rolling out out to the high street, hopefully. It's all these little extra ways that I use to build my income so I don't panic too much when publishers or whoever aren't knocking on my door at that very moment.
Steve Folland: That's smart. When you say you're going to hopefully roll it out to the high street, how you go about that? Are you approaching people or do you have an agent who does it?
Julia Broughton: No. I could get an agent. What I'm going to do is attend trade shows and then I'll just display my ranges. I've designed all new stuff so the high street cards are different from the ones I put up on Moonpig. Hopefully nice shops will come along and say, "We want those, please. Here is some money." I'm hoping!
Steve Folland: Then would you have to get those created and post them out?
Julia Broughton: Yes. That is what I see is the downside of going to the high street. I will then have to sort out all the printing, make sure I have all the stock, send them out into the world and hope they make it intact.
Steve Folland: Interesting.
Julia Broughton: I'm not the keenest on filling my house with boxes and boxes of cards, but hopefully it'll be a seamless process of them saying we'll have a hundred of those. I order a hundred, I send them off and I don't have to keep them for too long. But I think I'm being very optimistic there.
Steve Folland: What do you want to do, since you're very good at decorating things, you could just decorate the sides of the boxes with nice script,-
Julia Broughton: That's a good point. I should.
Steve Folland: ... with nice lettering-
Julia Broughton: I should do that.
Steve Folland: ... and then even make it like it's a wall mural, which is added insulation for your lounge or pile a load of them in the middle, put a piece of wood on top and call it a coffee table. There's always ways around this.
Julia Broughton: That is extremely smart.
Steve Folland: You're welcome! It sounds like you have a lot of confidence in dealing with the business side of being freelance.
Julia Broughton: Yeah. I think because I've always had that little voice in the back of my head saying one day you'll be a freelancer, I spent years and years of being in-house, in total, between the two companies, I was in-house for about eight years, I would just research. I'd always be looking at design blogs and other people's social media. A lot of creative people are freelancers, they just happen to be the ones that I was following, so I'd just absorb all the advice. When I did go freelance, I already knew about contracts, I already knew about how to save smartly for tax purposes. Because I knew my industry within cards, and that was still part of what I did, I already knew what I was doing there. I was extremely prepared. That's all I can say really.
Steve Folland: Sensible. I was about to say how has your business evolved, but we've clearly touched upon points. Is there any other ways that we haven't?
Julia Broughton: For me, the thing I really want to end up doing with my lettering is way more commercial stuff. I work heavily in publishing at the moment when I'm just purely doing lettering. But I really want to get out there and do advertising and logos. My lettering hero is Alison Carmichael. You might not know her name if you're not into lettering or design, but if you saw her work you'd know all of it. It's logos for Kingsmill and Mr Kipling. You'll walk into a supermarket and you'll see multiple examples of her work. That's what I'm aiming for. I want my lettering to be synonymous with daily life. I want my mom and dad to be able to walk into Sainsbury's and say, "Oh, that's Julia's work there. Oh, there it is again." That's how I want to evolve things so everything else is all a sideline to that goal.
Steve Folland: If you have goals, are you somebody who systematically works towards them or you've just picked that and it's in the distance somewhere in your mind?
Julia Broughton: I'm always trying to get there. I'm always applying to get an agent because I think that will help open doors to the bigger jobs. I feel I'm fairly single-minded. If I want to do something, I'll just keep doing it until I get it. If I give up it means I didn't really want it anyway. I've tried many little off shoots of business that I thought, "Maybe I'll try this. Maybe I'll try that." It doesn't really go anywhere, I just leave it and it's clear to me that that means that's not what I really wanted to do.
Julia Broughton: Like with wedding work to be honest. I'm a calligrapher for part of my job. So weddings seemed to be an obvious choice of things to do. But I never really chased it. I'd get the odd bit of work here and there. Place cards, table plans on mirrors, but I never really chased the work. It was always someone found me on Instagram or a friend of a friend was getting married and they came to me. Weddings died off for me and I decided I didn't want to do it. It almost got to a point where I was nervous if someone ever emailed me about doing invitations because I didn't want to do it. So I leave it behind, I move on.
Steve Folland: Did you remove it from your website and take it off your Instagram?
Julia Broughton: Yeah. One day I made a very bold choice. I had a whole section. I just unclicked the publish to site button one day. It felt like a really big deal, but then it was done and I was so relieved. Then a few months later, I was actually going through my statistics in the back of my website and I kept seeing pages from the wedding section being viewed. I thought, "Well, how the hell are they getting to invitations? Because that's been taken down." What I didn't realize was I'd unpublished the landing page of weddings, but I hadn't unpublished all the subsequent sections, like invitations, place cards. People had bookmarked them and they kept coming back. So I had to quickly scramble to get them taken down so they didn't start coming at me for doing an invitation suite or something.
Steve Folland: That's interesting in itself though that you're looking at your statistics. What else, when you look at it those metrics, are you looking for and how do you tweak things?
Julia Broughton: The main things I pay attention to are the most viewed pages. I like to see where people are in the world that have looked at me just for curiosity's sake. Pages viewed. I like to see which projects people are looking at and keep coming back to. I get a lot of traffic to my shop, which I find really strange because no one ever buys anything.
Julia Broughton: I've got to be just really honest about it. I've got boxes of products that I've had for about four years now. No one bloody buys them. I'll get the odd card here or there. I want rid. I might just have a bonfire. But people keep coming back to the shop and keep looking at everything. I just wish they'd bloody buy something.
Julia Broughton: It maybe the year of getting rid of my shop because I don't like dealing with it. I don't like having boxes of stuff in my living room. See previous discussion. So I may just get rid of it all, get rid of the shop and focus on providing products for other people to sell for me because when someone else is selling my stuff, they'll sell it. It's fine. If I tried to sell my stuff, no one. It's a nightmare. What is wrong with me? I don't know.
Steve Folland: That's the thing though. Selling stuff is a job in itself, isn't it?
Julia Broughton: Yeah. I've tried craft shows. Nope. That's just really depressing. Something about me and me selling my own products people just don't want. I've come to the point where I've accepted it and I'm just going to allow other people to do it, so it's fine. I'll try to pimp some of the things I'm selling on Instagram and it gets no engagement. I think I've just got to come to accept that on my Instagram people want videos of me doing calligraphy and they want to learn stuff. They want my hints and tips and that's absolutely fine. If that's what the audience wants that's what I need to give them. I just need to try and off-load a ton of notebooks and things and carry on my merry way.
Steve Folland: It's funny because equally that shop or at least the products in that shop act as a portfolio as well. Look at some look at some of the stuff. So maybe some people are looking but they're not looking to buy. They're looking in a broader way.
Julia Broughton: The trouble is the greetings cards are up to date, but the older products are my calligraphy from about three or four years ago. So I looked at it now and I cringe slightly because I've come a long way. I've been doing calligraphy for five years now, so this was quite early stuff. This it's a little bit painful for me to look at. Maybe I don't want that to be a portfolio.
Steve Folland: So your Instagram-
Julia Broughton: Yes.
Steve Folland: You do lots of stories then?
Julia Broughton: Yes, I have started. I can't remember when I started. Maybe last year sometime. I used to keep my Instagram very much here is the lettering I'm doing. That's it. Then I started to realize that all the accounts that I really liked were ones where people talk to the camera and talked about what they were doing. So I decided to be brave and start doing that. Because I was teaching I was used to getting up and talking in front of people. I was okay doing that and my jokes were landing so that was okay. I just applied it to my Instagram. At first it was really weird. One of my friends commented that I was using my phone voice. "Hello everyone."
Julia Broughton: It all got a little bit more Waitrose. Nowadays, I think it's a bit more natural and on the very rare occasion where I bump into someone who watches my Instagram, like at a calligraphy event or something, they'll say, "I really love your stories. They're really funny." That's reassured me into knowing that I should continue. It gets me really good engagement where I might not have the best engagement on actual posts. When I rant about something or my stories, I'll get loads of DMs and people just start having a chat with me. So it's been really good from that point of view.
Steve Folland: I love it that when you do show... For example, you might have a book that you've done the lettering for and you'll be showing off... You're getting quite a collection now it seems.
Julia Broughton: Yes, I am. I'm planning a post for the end of the year where I'm holding the stack. This is an exclusive for my content. I'm just really excited. Other people might be really cool about their work. They're like, "Oh, yeah. A few months ago I did this. Whatevs." But every time I receive a book and post, "I've got my letting on it," I literally did a little happy dance. I can't get over it. It's so exciting. I have to show the world. I'll take it and show my parents. I'm 35 years old. I'm still like, "Look mom, look what I did!" I just want to share the world and share my excitement. Also, I have a few art directors that follow me and watch my stories. I want them to see it as well so there's no point in being coy.
Steve Folland: I like the fact that they get to see your work, they also get to know you and the person that they might work with. That said though, most of your working relationships, do you meet people? Is it all remote now? How's that look?
Julia Broughton: It's pretty much all email, to be honest. Recently, with a project I was working on with Walker, I actually went into their office to discuss lettering styles. It's for a picture book and they were showing me previous books by the same illustrator. It was just so nice. It was nice to get out, wear outdoor clothes and talk to humans. I'm always game for an interview as long as it doesn't take all day or some mad amount of traveling. I'm quite lucky because I can easily get into London from where I live. Half an hour talking to people, come back, done.
Steve Folland: Have you found good ways of working with people remotely given that you spent so long working in offices with the people you were working with?
Julia Broughton: When I was in-house... It got to the point where I was a senior designer when I left Moonpig. I was pretty much in charge of my work and I would work fairly independently. We'd have weekly team meetings where we show what we do. The design manager or our director would approve designs and stuff. But pretty much I was working independently and that's just carried on in my freelance.
Julia Broughton: I'm not someone who likes a constant back and forth. What I really like about commercial work is people come to me and they say, "This is the title of the book. We like this style of lettering that's on your website. Do it in that by next Monday. We have this much money. Is that okay?" I say, "Yep, yep, yep," as long as it is enough money. Then I just do it and then I send it off. They might come back with a few tweaks and stuff, but that's pretty much the process and I really like it. I like just being left to get on with things.
Julia Broughton: I think that's why I've taken to freelance life so well because I'm quite independent. I'm not really a group work kind of gal. Everyone says, "Oh, I work well in a team or I work great by myself." I like working by myself. I've never liked team projects. I just groan because I just want to do everything myself. This is why I probably couldn't grow my business to include staff because I like doing things myself. I have real trouble letting things go and trusting someone else to do it as I want. I will probably be a lone wolf forever I think unless it's an accountant or someone doing emails. That's fine.
Steve Folland: Someone dealing with all of these boxes you're about to start sending to the high street.
Julia Broughton: Yeah, basically.
Steve Folland: How about socially though? Are you part of any communities?
Julia Broughton: I'm part of the Being Freelance Community. I don't know if you've heard of it?
Steve Folland: They're nice in there, aren't they?
Julia Broughton: Yeah. They like a biscuit. I'm not really part of any real world communities. I tried a few wedding supplier meet ups a couple of years ago. But because weddings are only a small part of my business, and now non-existent, I found it difficult to feel relevant or as involved. I tried a couple of things and, I'll be honest, I didn't really enjoy them that much.
Julia Broughton: I went to one and I just found it really depressing because everyone was bemoaning the fact that you could never have a full-time freelance career being creative. It's just too impossible these days. I was just sitting there quietly thinking, "I'm doing it and what I do is really niche." See, I just find that a bit depressing all these people just giving up. I just thought, "Maybe it's not for you then."
Julia Broughton: One of my best friends is a freelance designer, so we have daily chats and stuff, we're fine. I'm well adapted for freelance life because I don't mind being on my own. I'll go out, see my friends, I'll go out with my partner, but I'm fine being on my own. Chatting to people via social media is fine for me. It would be nice to find a group, but they'd have to be the right kind of people.
Steve Folland: That's nice about your friends though. Do you talk business as well?
Julia Broughton: Yeah. Life, business. We've been friends since school so we're pretty much sisters at this point, I reckon. We talk about business and dealing with clients. If there's a weird email to be sent we'll run it by each other to sense check it. That's really useful.
Steve Folland: Yeah, that's nice to have. So you work from home.
Julia Broughton: Yes.
Steve Folland: How about like the, I always say, work-life balance and slightly cringe when I say the phrase. But it's true, especially if you're working from home. You obviously like working by yourself but how do you find that?
Julia Broughton: I always find it's a difficult one because I see being a designer as a lifestyle. That sounds really bullshitty but it's ingrained into who you are I find. If you're doing it right anyway, I think. I don't really see a difference between my work and my actual life. It's just whatever I happen to be doing. I probably do focus too much on work maybe. It doesn't help that my desk is in my living room. I don't have a separate office, which is quite frustrating sometimes because my work is inherently quite messy. There's loads of paper and bowls of ink so I've always got everything everywhere.
Julia Broughton: I've got a very straight forward way of thinking about work. If I've got a lot on but a friend wants to go out for dinner... People are having kids, people have busy lives, I don't have that opportunity very often, so I will just say, "Okay, work down. I'm going to go and see my friend." I'm not someone who's boasting on Instagram about working at midnight and working through the weekend. If I have to do that I'm not very happy. I see work very much as work, which I feel contradicts what I said earlier, but in my head it makes make sense.
Julia Broughton: I'm never really mentally detached from my work because I've always got that mindset on if I'm on the tube and I see an advert and I'll see a handwritten, in inverted commas, font used, I just think, "I could have done that. I could have done it better." It's never switched off. It's part of my life. The physical act of doing work, I like to keep it Monday to Friday where I can. 9:00 till 6:00. Shorter if possible. I've got no issue with going to the gym, going out for dinner, seeing friends or just watching TV.
Julia Broughton: I'm not going to fall into that trap that other creatives seem to put out on the internet of working all the time. If you're not working 12 hours a day, you're failing. If you're not working the day after Christmas, what are you doing with your life? No, I'm taking two weeks off for Christmas. That's what I'm doing because I like to eat food and I like to relax. That was a very jumbled response and I don't know what you're going to make that.
Steve Folland: It's all right. We'll send it off to the freelance therapist on next week's episode.
Julia Broughton: Welcome to the inside of my brain and inside of someone's brain who doesn't talk to humans very often.
Steve Folland: Do you know what? I think a lot of people will relate with that. It's that thing where it sounds like you're often thinking about work because you can't help it and physically it's right there in front of you in your life. But equally, you are very happy to leave it behind and not feel guilty about the fact that you're going out for dinner or just sitting down and watching Netflix. When you do those in-store things... If you've not seen Julia's stories, she'll go into... Is it Molton Brown? Fancy?
Julia Broughton: Yeah. I do work for The Modern Calligraphy Company and they'll send me out to stores like Molton Brown, Jo Malone, Selfridges. So fancy places.
Steve Folland: The Modern Calligraphy Company, are they an agency type thing who get you that work?
Julia Broughton: They're a calligraphy company at the heart of it. They run workshops, do events and they also provide calligraphy services. They hired or worked out a network across the country of calligraphers to work with them. I'm a London calligrapher. I'll take care of companies that are in London or in Kent. It's so much easier for me because if I did the events just by myself, I'd be the one who had to liaise with the head offices or these companies, sort out money, sort out all the nitty gritty. This way I can just be sent somewhere on a certain day, at a certain time, and that's my involvement. I really like that because it's just the calligraphy that I have to do. I don't have to worry about the business side so that's really great.
Steve Folland: That is good.
Julia Broughton: Yeah.
Steve Folland: It sounds like having a niche within design has really helped you focus.
Julia Broughton: Oh, absolutely.
Steve Folland: I know there's the whole point of a niche. Maybe it sounds like a really stupid question, but is there ever been a niche within what you do?
Julia Broughton: There probably is. I've heard of someone out there, I don't know who, but another lettering artist told me that there is someone who only does lettering in chocolate. So you can get super niche. I don't like it quite at that level. I think I'm quite rare in that I work in loads of different styles. Most lettering artists, they'll work in a certain style, or they'll just be a calligrapher, or they'll just be a lettering artist for commercial purposes.
Julia Broughton: I like to do both. I work in calligraphy, I work with brush, I work with digital lettering, all sorts of things. The nice thing I found about working with publishers is that quite often they'll like a style on my website, but they'll want it slightly altered. Or they'll show me a style they're aiming for and they say, "Can you do this?" I say yes, not knowing if I can or can't, but I give it a go anyway, and it works out so far.
Julia Broughton: It pushes me to work in all of these different styles and add to my catalog. I know there's that whole thing of Jack of all trades, master of none, but I would get so bored if I was just doing the same style of lettering over and over again. I love that I can work in all these different styles. More fun styles, more sophisticated styles, chalk, ink, paint, my iPad. It just keeps my workload really varied and it just keeps it interesting.
Steve Folland: If you could tell your younger-self one thing about being freelance, what would that be?
Julia Broughton: Go with your gut because if I had gone with how I really felt about various things I would have never wasted my time doing wedding work, investing in it, printing those of sample things and wasting loads of money when deep down I always knew it felt a bit wrong. Trust your instincts with what work you actually want to pursue.
Steve Folland: Julia, it's been so great to speak to you... Julia, thank you so much. I'm glad we finally got to chat and all the best being freelance.
Julia Broughton: Thank you very much.