Hi. I'm Somari. I'm a freelance art director and lead designer based in London.
I help new and progressive businesses build better brands and services.
A few notable projects:
- I made some great packaging and branding for Plot Roasting.
- Another branding project I’m super proud of is FCB Coffee.
- I’ve worked on pitches for Lamborghini and Nike, and while it’s still under NDA all I can say it was hard but fun.
- If I’m not working as a contracted freelancer, I run a micro-agency doing pretty much the same thing.
- I’m an approved supplier for McCann Worldwide.
Skills:
- Art Direction
- Graphic Design
- Leading Freelancer team members
- Extensive Print Production Knowledge
- Brand Building
- Idea generation
- Marketing Planning
- Social Content Creation
- Photography
- External Photo shoot management
- Project Management
Tools:
- Self-appointed Photoshop Queen
- Indesign for layouts
- Illustrator illustrations/icons / design assets
- After Effects for gifs/videos
- Office / G Suite for project management
- Figma for UI
- Marvel for mockups
- Harvest for time-tracking
- Trello for organising
- Mailchimp for email marketing
- WordPress for Websites
Experience:
I started my design career back in the 2000s working for agencies and have spent the last 10+ years honing my freelance skills by working with eager business owners and clients who want to level up their branding, marketing and creative.
I combine my knowledge of technology and processes I’ve developed over the years with strategy and great visuals to deliver strong, effective campaigns and brands.
As a freelancer, it’s always hard to be seen as an extension of the company, but I pride myself in getting to know my clients, team members and contacts to understand the brief, the job, the culture and the outcome.
Since the beginning of 2013, I’ve been freelancing full time working on various projects in both the digital and print spheres. My core strengths are branding, packaging, marketing collateral, and social media graphics.
Notable projects include:
- Lamborghini: Milan Design week 2020 Pitch; Event signage; COVID 19 Mask Design
- McCann: Working on design visuals for The Truth About New Europe
- Island Poké: Working on social media and in-store visuals
- FCB Coffee: Design Lead – Complete rebranding project for an independent coffee shop chain with packaging design, signage, interior design, and marketing materials, RAMS documents, product management
- London School of Economics: Layouts of the student Handbooks in the updated School’s newly updated branding guidelines
- Hills Balfour: PR Pitch presentations for their Travel Clients
- RaceCaller / Sportcaller: UI design for online tips sharing platform & free to play sports game
- Park’s Edge Bar & Kitchen: Branding (logo design, signage visuals, menu design, menu template)
- Kafoodle: App wireframing and prototyping for back end software
- Phoxpop Magazine: Branding and art direction for indie magazine
- Octarine Dreams: Branding / Illustration / Manufacturing / Marketing of an ecommerce site selling enamel pins, stickers and pop culture lifestyle accessories.
This integrated design role included:
– Layout & design of marketing assets (including brochures, microsites, websites)
– Branding for new clients (corporate identity, websites, printed materials)
– Creating social media assets (Facebook pages, Twitter / Youtube profile graphics)
– Creating 360 product photography
– Photo Editing / Retouching
– Project Management
– Managing junior designers and freelancers
– Social Media management
Contract work on the Malaysia Kitchen Campaign which required designing web templates and digital marketing material, as well as ad hoc projects for DJ Hero, Walkers, Tropicana and Heinz.
Xtaster was a guerilla marketing company with one of the first UK-based social networks pre-Facebook. I was responsible for all internal and external communication, design and development of campaign marketing tools and project management.
I worked on all the online projects from website layout to online marketing assets (email newsletters, surveys). Notable projects included online flash games the BBC Club, game graphics for Honoloko (EEA) and an online verification system for Sainsbury’s. I also built the first Trees for Cities Treeathlon website in 2006.
Education
General Assembly – UX Design Bootcamp
The Open Window – HND Visual Communication
somari@hausofwest.com
Su-mo-what?
What’s in a name? Shakespeare basically said names are arbitrary labels. I have an Afrikaans name, made up of two other names (my grandmother’s). And a Dutch surname. It’s a bit much to take in at first. I get it. I’ve had people pronounce my name as Sumo… or Simaaari or Sumory or Summer-ey.
But it’s ok, I’ll give you a quick crash course in pronunciation:
Somari = Sue + Marie (think Anne-Marie the pop star) van der = fun durr Westhuizen = vest + haze + in Sue-Marie Fundurr Vesthazin 🤪
That’s how you would pronounce it in South Africa. Although most of my readers will be in the UK. So it’s ok if you only get to the ‘van’ part of my surname before panicking. Some of my close friends call me Soni, like Sony but with an ‘i’ (story for another post). Things can never just be simple innit? At the end of the day, a name is just a label and labels are fluid, changing, evolving. So try Somari. If it doesn’t work: Soni or Sandwich or Design Samurai. Easy.