People really don’t know what’s good for them. I tell clients all the time: use a password manager, and make every password unique and complex. Do they listen? Rarely. Put simply, about 60% of people whose passwords I know are neither unique nor complex. At Comus, we handle sensitive data…

I made a deliberate decision not to include images in this journal. Here are the reasons why: I’m a designer Most of my day-to-day work is visual. I spend my time building brands, designing products, and thinking about how things look and feel. I don’t need this space to do…

I have a good friend who has run a lot of businesses. He’s probably one of the smartest people I know. He’s interesting for a lot of reasons, but mainly because he gives excellent business advice. Not because he’s good at business, but because he’s failed at almost everything. I…

We built Comus from the ground up with a lot of things hard-coded and designed simply to work, not to follow best practice. That was deliberate. The goal was to get something live, prove the concept, and see if the model stacked up. And it did. It worked. If you…

The Agency Obsession With “Big” In the agency world, there’s a constant undercurrent of pressure to be servicing bigger clients, more famous clients, growing your team, and dealing with bigger budgets. Every agency event I’ve ever been to is punctuated with the same questions:How big is your team now?Who are…

As a brand guy, I’ve registered a few trademarks and I’ve advised clients on registering trademarks with the UK Intellectual Property Office. So when it came to registering Comus as a trademark, it felt obvious that I should just get on with it myself. I paid the £170, submitted the…

What a year. It was important, it was difficult, and it was uneven. Yazaroo 2025 was a proper rollercoaster for us. When work came in, it hit hard; when it didn’t, everything went quiet. Most people in marketing had a tough year, between AI disruption and general economic gloom; demand…

As part of my overhaul of Yazaroo’s services and positioning heading into 2026, I’m launching Yazaroo Ventures: a deliberate strategy for working with startups. It began with Kani.House in 2018. I built the brand, website, digital, print, video, marketing – everything except the product – in exchange for equity. It…

For 10 years we have provided web design, hosting, website support, graphic design, brand design and print. We have since added to this typeface design, SEO, and PPC. I have made the decision that starting Q1. 2026, we will offer a reduced service line of web design, WordPress support, web…

There is a whole industry of online business coaching telling small businesses to copy Apple, Nike, Starbucks and Tesla. Act like the giants and you will grow like the giants. It is terrible advice, and this post is about why. The problem is context. What works at global scale works…

Too often, when I’m hired to build a brand, the client wants the logo to show what they do. This is a complete misunderstanding of what a logo is for. A logo is just an identifier. Its job is to be simple and distinctive, nothing more. Meaning comes from context….

Charities are a force for good. I was a trustee of one myself. But that experience, combined with running businesses that get invited to a lot of charity events, has forced me to question whether all charities are actually valid in the way they operate. Take the cancer research centre…

I’ve been running Yazaroo for several years, and it has been a success. We built a profitable business with a small team, focusing on brand design, web support, hosting, and website development. Most of our work was straightforward and steady, but every now and then, we landed large projects worth…

I spent about seven years building and running the e-commerce website for a shop selling a widely available consumer product. I also handled the marketing and gave strategic advice along the way. The site was built deliberately for local SEO. Customers found products on Google, ordered, and collected locally or…

2025 marks the end of a seven-year project I had with Neil Phillipson. We built a garden building company called Kani House, which started back in early 2018. At the time, Neil was already building astronomical observatories. We met at an expo, I was promoting Yazaroo and he was Outsideology….

Starting a business on a small budget demands low cost, but far-reaching marketing tactics. The most logical place is to start by creating evergreen blog posts. Information that provides tangible value to potential customers: people who are actively looking for a solution we provide in Google. It will come as…

We have been building Comus for over a year. The first version had no graphical interface at all. It was managed entirely through PHP. That was deliberate. We wanted to test the concept and prove the market before sinking serious time into a full product. No point polishing something nobody…

Something I’ve learned over the years, working with lots of designers, and particularly young designers,  is that there’s a real obsession with perfection in the design world. In most creative agencies, everyone wants to produce the best work they possibly can, and they want everything to be absolutely spot on….

One of the key things I learned early on while developing Comus was something I really wasn’t expecting to learn. In fact, it’s something you’d never assume going in. We assumed that everyone we worked with would broadly share our vision, or at least understand what we were trying to…

So any logical person looking at the events industry at the moment would probably see an industry that is still trying to recover from the pandemic. An industry that is becoming ever more regulated with new legislation such as Martyn’s Law coming into effect next year, and an industry that…