We recently chatted with founder Kathryn George, who has just gone through our latest CO.STARTERS cohort with her new company KG Design Consultancy.
Q. Kathryn, tell us what your company does?
KG Design Consultancy produces ‘snackable’, animated infographic videos that help businesses explain their products or services.
With each video, we try to capture the essence of a company’s value, using simple but fun visuals that can easily be viewed, liked and shared. We believe in the power of visuals to communicate an idea, product or service in a fun and engaging way.
A recent GIF for 9Spokes.
The way people consume media is always changing, including the way we watch videos, so our videos are designed with current viewing habits and expectations in mind. We like to keep things simple, clear and focused, to help stand out amongst the noise of social media.
Here’s a video we recently created for online learning platform LearnCube:
Q. What type of customers can you help?
We can help digital marketers and companies with existing static content, who want to get their brand moving with dynamic media such as animated GIFs or videos.
We can also assist digital marketers and companies who want to convey a complex idea or process in a simple, clear visual way, using an animated explainer video.
Need help? Reach out! I’d love to talk with you.
Q. What has your journey been so far?
I started KG Design Consultancy after 30 years of creating information graphics for the newspaper media industry in the U.K., Australia and New Zealand.
Back in the day when computers weren’t widely available, I created pen & ink illustrations and graphics by hand for the Auckland Star newspaper.
Afterwards I worked at The Age newspaper in Melbourne, where we got our first Macintosh computer, which had a display all of about 9 inches! There were ten artists to the one Macintosh, so we used to fight over whose turn it was … a lot!
Another recent GIF for 9Spokes.
When I moved to London, I began working more with Macs. I fell in love with their simplicity and design, which hugely influenced me for decades onwards. I freelanced at various papers, including The Guardian, The Mail and The Telegraph until I eventually I settled at the Today newspaper. When Rupert Murdoch closed it down, I got transferred to The Sun.
At The Sun, I trained and led a design team to produce infographic content for print. As the media landscape changed from print-centric to digital, I developed my team in becoming cross-platform creatives providing digital and motion graphics for the web and native apps.
But then the newspaper industry began losing its domination within the mass media market, so I left The Sun to return to New Zealand and find something new. I knew something better was on the horizon.
I had an idea to animate the news, because I felt the current offerings on social media just weren’t cutting it. ‘NewsAnimate’ would be an alternative media outlet that produced highly engaging, real news content designed for quick, on-the-go consumption. But this would be a huge undertaking and probably require many resources. So I decided to put that on hold, at least for the moment.
When I heard that mobile video consumption was expected to increase tenfold by 2020, I thought of all the marketers that would need to produce more video content. So I decided to start my own company that could help with this, and KG Design Consultancy was born.
My vision was to use all my experience to help small businesses and organisations to communicate their ideas, by creating sharable, consumable video content to connect with their audience.
So far, I’m enjoying every second of my ad-venture. It’s been an incredible journey, and I have met loads of interesting people along the way. I learnt a tonne about being an entrepreneur through Mum’s Garage and the CO.STARTERS course which has helped me to hit the ground running.
A video we recently created for Mum’s Garage.
Q. What are your next steps, and goals for the future?
My next step is to grow my business and client base. It may require me to take on more people, and that will probably be my next challenge in the future.
I’m also going to start the blog section on my website. The goal of my blog is to help others to become better visual communicators, and I’ll do this by sharing my knowledge; experience and my design process.
My goal is to get the business into a place where it runs autonomously. Hopefully, that will afford me the time to develop my idea of an animated news outlet.
Q. How can we help you?
I’ll start my blog soon, and any feedback will be much appreciated. It will give me a hand in understanding what people find useful, which will, in turn, help me to offer what’s best for my clients and their customers. After all, that’s what business is all about – helping others.
Thanks Kathryn! We really loved hearing your story. If you need videos or GIFs, make sure you reach out to Kathryn.