We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kyle Strahl a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kyle, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

Yes I have been a graphic designer and now the owner of KEYLAY Design for over 14 years. I originally sought out to be a freelance graphic designer after I was laid off from an advertising agency after the 2008 crash. I wasn’t trained to be an entrepreneur nor did I have goals to be one. I sort of landed in this position after discovering a big need for supplementary design services to larger agencies and companies in Atlanta. I learned that people were seeking me/us out through word of mouth and that they were trying to find people who were reliable and creative at the same time. Being uber creative was a giant plus although we discovered that companies are more eager to work with reliable people who are going to stick around. I have found through the years that our reliability and willingness to listen has won over the trust of many marketing directors and companies allowing us to thrive in the industry. Thus equating earning a nice living when I originally was navigating life (still happily) on freelancer funds. As mentioned I first started off via word of mouth and helping friends with their branding, marketing and packaging design campaigns. After about a year of collaborating with these business owners and marketing managers.I decided to create a website and gained some traction with google Adwords and google places searches. It took about ten years of growing our base through word of mouth to now being a highly sought after Atlanta firm where we get a lot of viable connections through our client relationships and website. We now focus heavily on branding for startups, ongoing graphic design assistance for marketing teams and packaging design for new product launches. I don’t think that we could have sped up the process of creating client relationships but thinking back, I do wish that we could have grown our Internal team faster. We have been extremely picky about the creative people that we invite into our team. This strengthens our creative power but the caveat is that it slows down our capacity to grow because we require a lot of trust and vetting to bring someone new into the circle. We would love for this process to be more seamless and quicker.

Kyle, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Since I talked about how we got here in the first section I will give some insight into what we do.
Since 2008, I’ve worked with start-ups and small to mid-sized businesses to design new brands and create effective print and digital campaigns. We like to say that “Memorable brands aren’t born. They’re 𝙙𝙚𝙨𝙞𝙜𝙣𝙚𝙙.” And as the founder and creative director of KEYLAY Design, I lead a dynamic team that understands how seriously creative ideas impact your marketing and business. 𝙈𝙮 𝙣𝙪𝙢𝙗𝙚𝙧 𝙤𝙣𝙚 𝙜𝙤𝙖𝙡 𝙞𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙗𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙤𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙗𝙚𝙨𝙩 𝙞𝙣 a companies 𝙢𝙖𝙧𝙠𝙚𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜 and their 𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙙.

As we work with individuals, startups and marketing directors are focus and expertise revolves around:

– Logos & Branding
– Graphic Design
– Web Design
– Packaging Design
– Trade Show Graphics

I am most proud of the relationships/partnerships that we have built with clients and creatives throughout the years. People come back to us because they trust our work, mesh with our values and enjoy working with our team. We are obsessed with anything and everything creative and the data that makes advertising campaigns unite with potential customers. Because of the obsession that we have for the creative world and the love that we have for people we are able to wrap everything up into a package that we enjoy giving back to our clients and community.

We have worked with some of the following companies:

Sprint/T-Mobile
Quicken Loans/Rocket Mortgage
CDE/goEBT
Superior Essex
Interactive College of Technology
Morehouse School of Medicine
Concrete Pump Supply
IRIS
Parallel
City of Atlanta
SECO International
NIIT
LiveVox

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being creative?

We enjoy getting the initial call or meeting with the client to hear about their vision, love for their company, pain points, goals and zeal for the brand or campaign that they want to create. Then we get even more excited when we present to them visuals and creative messaging that they originally only imagined and then turn that into something tactical they can hold and wrap their minds around. We love it when they say “This is more than I could have ever imagined!”. That’s when the work that we do comes full circle and makes me even more proud of our KEYLAY team.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Contact Info:

• Website: keylaydesign.com