AgencyEdinburgh design agency

About the partnership

The client was a small Edinburgh-based design agency working across branding, packaging and print, with a client roster that ran from independent businesses up to a major supermarket. From October 2015 to April 2018 I was their embedded freelance developer - two days a week, initially on-site in their central Edinburgh studio and later remotely.

I learned a lot in that seat. With one developer who knew both the codebases and the partners, the agency had a named developer on their bench they could quote against - and I built up a working knowledge of their clients that made each project quicker than the last.

What I worked on

Across the partnership I worked on several of the agency's client sites, including a national membership body, an education provider and an engineering firm. Some I built from their designs; others I picked up for maintenance and enhancements. I also built the agency's own site.

By year two I knew the agency's clients well enough to front technical conversations with them directly, with the partners' confidence behind me.

How I would describe working together

The agency was a small, design-led team who needed a senior pair of hands that could deploy from their designs without rewriting the brief in development. The partnership stands as one of the cleanest examples of the model I still sell today: a named freelance dev on an agency's bench, multiple client projects in flight, long enough that the relationship compounds rather than restarts every quarter.

The agency itself has since wound down, but the work and the relationships were genuine.

All case studies

This article was drafted with the help of AI to populate the page. I'm in the process of rewriting it - a principle I adhere to across all projects. AI produces boilerplate, not production-quality output.