Monday 05 Feb 2007
Working through an agency can mean a higher profile, more business, and more time spent actually creating work rather than generating it, but many illustrators are nervous of signing on the dotted line. Digit explores how to choose the best representation.
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I draw manga/anime characters. I also do graphic design and photography.RT @spialelo
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There are two categories of freelance creatives – those with representation, and those without. The question is, which fares better, financially and professionally?
Do you need an agent in order to prosper, or might you be better advised running your own affairs, and keeping the 30 per cent of your fee that most agencies levy?
Ulla Puggaard is a well established illustrator who’s better placed than most to answer this, as she’s represented by three agencies – Central Illustration Agency (www.centralillustration.com) in the UK, Kate Larkworthy (www.larkworthy.com) in the US, and an outfit in her native Denmark.
“It’s a big jungle out there,” she says, “and to have time collating work and finding clients can be really exhausting, and then there’s a whole lot of practical things, such as negotiating fees, sending invoices, and tracking money when it doesn’t show up.”
Besides this, the London design scene was also alien to Puggaard, so she opted to find an agent because “they’ll know that market inside out and it’s much more likely they’re going to find you good work”.
Another for whom geography was a key factor in sourcing an agent was Jonny Hannah, a Southampton-based illustrator who is with the Heart agency (www.heartagency.com).
“The truth is you don’t actually need an agency to get work,” says Hannah. “One of the reasons I’ve got one is I live in Southampton, which isn’t far from London, but far enough to mean I’m removed from the scene.
“It’s nice to have someone representing me in the city where illustration is commissioned, and it’s also handy when it comes to getting jobs that are bigger and that earn more money.”
Paul McNally is currently unrepresented, but in the new year the South London-based designer, illustrator and art director will be joining soon-to-be-launched Debut Art Directions, an agency whose roster will offer everything from print and packaging design, installation work, interiors and even curating.
Like Puggaard, McNally is finding it tough juggling creativity with housekeeping. “Having representation may mean you have to hand over a percentage of your money, but it means you can just get on with the creativity and not worry about any of the other stuff.”
Once a designer or artist has decided representation is the way ahead, the challenge is not just finding an agency, but finding the right agency. Puggaard’s advice to creatives is to do your research.
“This is important, because one agent might be good for one kind of work and another good for another sort. For illustrators, you can get a feel for this by going to the Association of Illustrators (www.theaoi.com), and there are many index books where lots of agents show different artists, such as the Art Book (http://tinyurl.com/yfdczt).
“The Internet is brilliant for research, too. If you see an illustrator’s work in a magazine you can search for that person and find his or her agent.”
Slim pickings
Once you’ve got a shortlist of potential agencies that are a good creative fit with your work – whether this is illustration, design or interactivity based – the hard work really begins, because most of the established agencies take on only a handful of new people each year.
Your portfolio has to be mightily impressive, as do your interpersonal skills. Darrel Rees, director of agency Heart, says new people must have “an original and committed voice to whatever they’re doing”.
Trend parrots need not apply, agrees Sam Summerskill, an agent with Debut Art (www.debutart.com). “Artists should never follow trends, but just be themselves and do their own work. People can spot a fake quite easily. There are lots of people out there that can do pretty illustrations, but there’s not much depth to them.
“What we’re looking for in our creatives is ideas and fresh talent – people who are doing something new and exciting, and who understand our clients’ needs.”
Summerskill stresses that new artists also need an amicable nature. “They have to be able to get on with briefs,” he says. “Once we’ve dealt with the contract and budgeting side of things, it’s between the artist and the client to crack on with the project.” The ability to ‘crack on’ is something designers and agents alike say legislates against recent graduates who are looking for representation.
Darrel Rees of Heart says: “We don’t take on that many graduates because the problem is they’re not fully fledged. It’s all very well having beautiful work but if it’s all self-commissioned then they’re the only one who’s calling the shots on what goes in an image.
“They need to prove that they can actually answer a brief, because they’ll be solving someone’s design problem for them. You need to be able to show that you can work with people and take their art direction.”
Experience counts
Hannah is among the small minority of graduates to have landed an agent fresh out of college, but said his inexperience still weighed against him.
“The problem is, when you leave college no-one knows who you are, and an agent can’t really help you that much, and I got no work at all.
“I’d say it’s better for graduates to get out there and build a reputation, and then hopefully an agent will then be able to get you more work.”
But even for established creatives, having an agent is no guarantee that work can be turned on and off like a tap.
“You’re not sorted just because you’ve got an agent,” says Puggaard. “There’s still a huge amount of work that you have to do yourself. When nothing is happening, you have to refurbish your portfolio and reinvent yourself.
“You have to come up with new things because some styles just won’t be in demand. You have to supply your agent constantly with new work. It’s like working for free.”
The importance of the portfolio is something that’s echoed by one and all. For a represented designer, the portfolio is a passport to new work – neglect it, and the phone simply will not ring.
“It’s very important for artists to keep their portfolios up to date,” says Summerskill.
“If people are hungry for new and interesting work and an artist’s portfolio hasn’t changed in six months it makes them wonder what on earth they’ve been doing in that time.”
Heart works closely with its artists on keeping their portfolios fresh and vital. “We help our artists refresh their portfolio and we print them here,” says Rees, “rather than let them get a mish-mash of images together. I don’t really trust them to have the best eye for which work is best, because they get very attached to pieces that just aren’t their best.
“Illustrators’ portfolios tend to look a bit shabby and knocked about, full of tear sheets and bits and pieces. It’s a take-me-as-you-find-me sort of attitude, but I think when you’re asking someone for a lot of money to do a job then presentation is really important.” Summerskill says.
Debut Art urges its illustrators to keep all their personal work, because this is the best way for them to maintain a captivating portfolio. “A lot of our artists might exhibit as fine artists, or as illustrators, but with a different look and style to their commercial work.
“It’s important they keep their own ideas and work going as well as commissioned work, which by its nature is someone else’s thoughts and input.”
Portfolio management is one area where good agencies can prove invaluable, but what else do they do to justify their cut?
“I think we offer our artists a really good bespoke service,” claims Rees. “We have a high agent-to-staff ratio, and we fight their corner in every respect on jobs, and especially on contracts. If you look at some of these contracts they’re totally draconian.
“They’re basically rights grabbing. If an illustrator just accepts this as normal then their whole basis for establishing a viable career with any degree of longevity is immediately undermined.”
Heart client Hannah, for one, is appreciative of this. “Heart has strict guidelines as to how much a job should be worth, and they don’t move from that. I think that’s important, because illustration fees haven’t really gone up much in the past 30 years, so it’s crucial we don’t let them drop any lower than they are.”
Matching creatives with their preferred type of work is also something good agencies will prioritize. Summerskill says:
“We work very hard to get the artist the jobs they want to get. Once we know the clients an artist wants to work for, we’ll find out who does that client’s work and meet with them.
“If someone’s dream job is to work with Coca-Cola, we’ll push very hard to get them that project. Because our clients trust us, eight times out of ten they’ll accept the suggestions we put before them.”
Getting noticed
Promotion is another valuable and time-consuming task that an agent can take from an illustrator. “Some agents will do more than others in terms of promoting their artists,” explains Summerskill.
“You have to be proactive – you can’t sit back and wait for the phone to ring. “We do a lot of meetings with new people, showing them work, The better you get to know clients the earlier they’ll come to you in a project.
“This means that instead of saying ‘Do this’, it’s more a case of ‘How do you think we could do this?’, which works better for our illustrators. We courier portfolios to clients across the globe, and have regular mailing lists to people working in publishing, editorial, advertising, and design.”
Anger management
Your agent should support you through thick and thin, too. Puggaard believes a decent agency will earn its salt when things go wrong with clients.
“When you do a job and the client is not happy, if you have a good agent they are able to negotiate a good middle ground and they will always back up the artist.”
She also maintains that the onus of promotion falls more on the creative than the agent. “Even when you begin to get a reputation and become more established, the challenge is maintaining that. I do this by getting myself in loads and loads of publications, all of which is unpaid.
“It’s about making your work seen as much as possible. I’m involved with a Danish magazine called S Publication (www.spublication.com) at the moment that has given me a great platform to experiment. You have to publicize yourself much more than your agent does.”
The creative-agent relationship can be rocky, and it’s not uncommon for them to part company. Of his commission-free time with his first agency, Hannah says: “I’d maybe send them the odd thing for my portfolio but it was quite a cold relationship, and they didn’t seem overly interested. I dare say they were busy with other illustrators who were getting work.”
Rees, meanwhile, reveals that artist-agent problems can be of both a creative and personal nature.
“We had a couple of instances recently where the artist’s work had developed in a way that wasn’t beneficial to them, and if they’d sought representation on the basis of that work then I’d not have been interested.
“Some of the more obvious cases have been where people make the transition between traditional media to using a computer. Sometimes they just get it totally wrong, and we have to part company.
“More usually, though, it’s to do with a deterioration in the relationship, which usually happens when the artist expects you to play on their team all the time, but plays on your team as, and when, it suits them.
“If they want such a dispassionate relationship with an agent then they need to go to a dispassionate agency where there’s over 100 artists to a couple of agents and nobody really gives a damn what they do. There are plenty of agencies like that.”
View from the client side
If it wasn’t for the demand for illustration, design and photography, agencies would be redundant. By definition, an agency is just as useful for the client as it is for the people it represents. Dixon-Baxi (www.dixonbaxi.com) is a hugely popular London-based design and directing outfit that has managed to maintain its two-man structure thanks to it being a client of Debut Art.
“We used to run a much larger design company,” says co-owner Simon Dixon, “but about five years ago we started Dixon-Baxi. We decided at that point that we wanted to downsize the mechanics of managing a design business, and just stick to creating. What we found was that it was easier to collaborate with other companies rather than individuals that we employed or hired as freelancers.”
He adds: “Using Debut Art also removes uncomfortable conversations about money from the creative process, which is really important for us, because we don’t want to grubby the fun part by talking about money.” But getting representation for the company is not on the agenda, says Dixon.
“We like to represent ourselves because we want to build a long-term reputation; we’re keen that our reputation is built from how we see the world. Some people will like it and some people won’t but we nurture that over time, so there’s no surprises. We don’t want to get to next year and find we’ve got no work, because we’re gone from being seen as the next big thing to being a couple of hacks.”
Sean Ashcroft
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Do you share your creations online?