Established in 2001, a fish in sea are an experienced graphic design company with a studio based in Wandsworth Common, London, UK.

Can we really get that groovy little fish to spin...

Established in 2001, a fish in sea are a graphic design company that has grown from strength to strength, now offering expert capabilities in many fields of design, the beginning was a little different...

Originally the sole trade company of Managing Director, Michael Mursell, a fish in sea was started in Ealing, London, to provide graphic design and logo design solutions. (Mainly so that Michael did not have to work for anyone else!) Having been employed at several design companies in London, and freelanced for 9 months before travelling around the globe, Michael took the opportunity to harness the marketing power of the internet on his return to find new clients - a freelancers greatest challenge is maintain a steady flow of work. As a career, freelancing is feast or famine most of the time, as its difficult to juggle the winning of work with the completion of jobs already on the books.

After a difficult first year, Michael moved to a new flat in South London, where the promotion of a fish in sea through SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) led to a huge influx of clients requiring design services - the business grew organically and steadily, as existing clients were retained and new clients added to the ever expanding list.

a fish in sea dominated the search results for several years, and the increase in workload meant that support was continually required from a pool of freelancers to keep up with the demand. After a year of this, the decision was made to take on additional permanent designers so that client requirements were met. Several designers joined at this point, Geoff and Jamie - and they are still with us today.

With the web site design capabilities of Jamie, we entered a new direction - whilst the web was something that we had dabbled with before, and our own site performed very well, Michael did not feel that he could offer his services in this field professionally without a huge learning curve, one that Jamie had already been through. That has been one of our core values really, offering design services that we can perform really well, rather than at an average level, so that our customers really get over and above what they want.

With new stafff, we needed more room, so we moved premises - leaving the studio in the flat and migrating to serviced offices in West Norwood. Quite exotic, and very exciting, this boost in confidence was met with new local clients who kept us on our toes! The following year was frantic - for some reason, more designers bring in much more design work - and the breadth of design skills we could offer grew tremendously. Culminating with the addition of two web developers, our course was set. We were to develop our own CMS (Content Management System) that offered us the flexibility required by our clients at a price they could not only afford, but also justify. The office was getting cramped - and a little fruity with the constant junk food and long hours... it was time to move on.

In November 2006, we found our spiritual home - a studio in the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building, Wandsworth Common - a beautiful gothic structure, in pleasant surroundings, surrounded by like-minded creatives, traditional artists and craftsmen, actors and a great little bar! What more did we need? Ahh, yes... more talented designers! So, we have recently expanded our skill set again, with the addition of some truly outstanding animators (ranfing from 3D to Stop Animation) and an artist with a fine art background. The breadth of skill is quite refreshing yet the atmosphere in the studio more difficult to describe now, due to its complexities - its warm, fun, competent and hardworking and motivated, we are only now starting to realise... this is just he beginning!

So to draw this brief tale to an end, we should answer the long standing question, where does your company name come from? - as it is asked quite regularly!

There are several reasons, firstly its an obvious play on words - a fish in sea = efficiency - which is quite appropriate. It was one of a long list of names that were drawn up whilst on a bus, travelling in Vietnam - the idea stretches back to 2000, and conveniently SEA is the acronym for South East Asia. A search on the internet at the time showed that it brought up only one result - and it was therefore deemed pretty unique (at the time of writing, a search on 'a fish in sea' brings up 8,200,000 results - not all of them are us, even though we have good SEO!) It is quite usual for graphic design companies to have unusual, inspiring or 'wacky' names - now we had ours. From a design perspective there is also the opportunity to have a spinning fish logo - which was just bound to look cool!

a fish in sea,
Royal Victoria Patriotic Building
Fitzhugh Grove,
London.
SW18 3SX. UK

Freephone: 08000 58 24 50 or email us.