Today millions of Brits will lie in bed for another ten minutes, spend an additional five minutes munching through extra toast over a lazy breakfast and take a longer shower. They won’t have to rush for the early train or get into the fast lane of traffic congestion. Instead, they will amble into their home office, switch on their PC and get stuck into emails and buried in office documents without commuting distractions, for today is National Work from Home Day.

Most undiscovered UK designers experience periods of absolute frustration, as your designs go largely unnoticed by the majority of the design community and you lack the funds to get access to the usual platforms to be seen. Organisations like Hidden Art offer such platforms for UK designers to get noticed, but there is still plenty you can do on your own. It is easy to become dispondant, but with a striking design idea, you are usually only a few steps away from starting to make something of your ideas. Essentially you are sitting on a powderkeg, and you just need a little interest to spark it into life.

The one thing aspiring designers tend to attract is other aspiring designers, and you can use your battling network to your advantage. Split between a collective, the usually prohibitive price of UK design shows can be brought into reach.

Once you’ve picked your fellow UK designers, a show to split costs on and got your designs lined up, you need to let people know you’ll be there. The best way to reach a big audience is through the press, and the easiest way to get there is to get a press release to the right people.

Journalists are often pushed for time, and it is not unusual for an entire press release to be wholly copy and pasted to form a short article. Your press release should be written in a straight-forward fashion, avoiding the use of ‘flowery’ adjectives and intesifiers like ‘very’ and ‘absolutley’. While obviosuly being favourable to your products, it should also appear impartial. Writing your press release in the balanced nature (most) journalists are out to achieve increases the chances of your release getting the straight-to-print treatment. It also allows journalists who are going to write at length about you see to the very core of your designs, which will form the basis of their article, without having to fight through your opinions.

Your aim with a press release is essentially to make the easiest job possible for the journalists who will be reading it. It is this fact that makes the angle of your press release such an important factor in its success. By giving a central theme, or hook, to your article it gives the journalist an instant, hopefully logical connection, between the you and the people exhibiting with you: it gives them something to talk about, as well as plenty of content to inform their piece.

Working as a group, it can be difficult to come up with a combined angle, but the angle can be created from any level of detail, with the emphsis on either the designs or the people involved. Hidden Art’s section of UK designer press releases are a good source of press releases which deal with groups of designers exhibiting together. Here the angle of releases varies from design similarities between the majority of (but not necessarily all) pieces to the background (or relative anonymity) of the designers.

Once your angle is established, you need to go about writing the body of your press release. Your angle should be laid out clearly in your press release’s title, and followed up with more detail in the first line of text. From this point you can outline the people and products on display, taking care to clearly link each new piece back to the established angle. It is equally important to ensure that you are presented as a group of UK designers to avoid confusion: you don’t want the journalist thinking there is a lead designer, with other designers working under them. Remember, exhibiting in a group is a benefit: it is a major bonus to journalists who see it as a chance to get the low down on numerous designers in one visit. For this purpose it may be useful to give your collective a name. Name yourself after your studio address, your favourite (collective) film, anything you want – just ensure that throughout the rest of the release your individual company names are strongly linked to your individual products.

A group press release can be just as effective for UK designers as an individual press release, if not more so. Just make sure you can create a feasible angle to grab the journalists’ attention, keep it balanced and fair, and present as a unified group. You are in a great position to get some attention, so let your designs speak for themselves.

As internet marketing evolves so do the responsibilities of the copywriter. There was a time when the copywriter was just brought in to splash punchy prose over the website’s pages, before packing up and moving on to the next project. It was the web developers who stayed behind to keep an eye on the site, and make sure it was well sign posted and a pleasant place to visit.

However, research on people’s shopping habits suggests that copywriters are now a vital part of a site’s maintenance team.

I often read complaints by US and UK copywriters on the swamping of freelance work bidding websites by Indian writers. Many blame the low prices on the foreign competition, prepared to work for fees sometimes lower than the minimum wage.

For a while, webmasters loved it. They had a huge online pool of intelligent, university educated Indian graduates prepared to work for bargain basement prices. However, the tide might be slowly turning back in favour of the natives as webmasters realise that they might not be getting quite what they had wanted.