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Episode
120

Branding for Schools

An interview with
Craig Burton

Introduction

Finding a niche has become a hot topic in the graphic design world. One designer that has succeeded at this is Craig Burton, who works on branding for Schools in New Zealand through his company School Branding Matters.

Ian interviews Craig to discuss how he first go into designing for schools, how he attracts clients in the education sector, his approach to marketing through social media, and how he uses search engine optimisation to allow potential clients to find his website through Google.

Craig Burton Interview Transcription

Ian Paget: You work in a niche. And I've used you as an example throughout the podcast since I've started it, because I think if anyone out there is niching and doing well, you are one of the best examples that tends to come at mind. So your niche is branding for schools. You have School Branding Matters. And I it's this that I would really like to talk about on this podcast and we'll see where this conversation goes. But I'd like to start this by going back a little bit prior to you creating School Branding Matters. So how did you originally get into graphic design for schools?

Craig Burton: I originally worked for a design studio here in Christchurch, and I worked there for about six years. And then my wife and I decided to have children and I resigned from work initially to go home and look after our first child. And then from there, I started doing a little bit of freelance work part-time to fit in with all of that. And in 2007, 2008, there was the global financial crisis. And the little bit of work that I had dried up quite a bit. So I wasn't really doing very much, and by that stage, my children were at school. And one of my daughter's teachers was creating these certificates at school, and they were Microsoft stick figure certificates. And I thought, "Oh, these are pretty average."