You're a graphic designer, illustrator, brand designer or interior designer, and the portfolio-to-pipeline gap is the bind every designer in your network keeps talking about. Compass helps you build your visibility with the right clients through a well researched marketing plan that earns you enquiries, retained work and referrals whilst teaching you the marketing craft that your studio can rely on in the future. Try Compass today with a free 90 day growth plan.
It's Thursday evening. You finish the final files for the brand refresh, you upload the case study to Dribbble, you check the inbox for the proposal you sent last Friday, and the picture is patchy. Two clients in the pipeline, one waiting on a fee approval that's been a fortnight overdue, and the next two months look light on the calendar. Your last three projects came through old colleagues and one cold enquiry from the work you posted in March, your Instagram has gone quiet, and the studio two doors down has announced a creative direction role for a major brand. You know you need to do something to bring the next clients in but the options run into the dozens, and the difficulty of marketing yourself when the work is supposed to speak for itself is the wall every designer hits eventually. So what do you do?
Most marketing advice for designers was written for agencies with a new-business team and an account director who handles the pitches, and the consultancies offering business-development training charge fees that two unbooked weeks cannot recover. It is feast or famine, you are either too flat out to market or too anxious about the empty diary to face it, and your own site has sat two years out of date while you polish everyone else's. The agency playbook leans on tactics that fit forty-person studios with overheads, and the trade press is full of practices at scales that have nothing in common with yours. The advice you can find online slips into trying everything once, committing to none, and ending the quarter with the calendar still light and the case study still unfinished on Dribbble.
Most AI tools take the marketing off you and produce copy that looks templated, which for someone who sells taste is the fastest way to lose. Compass works the other way around. It brings AI speed together with coaching and craft, so your own studio voice stays intact and you learn to market yourself the way you solve a design problem.
Compass starts with positioning, because the way you describe your practice decides whether the buyer reading your site understands that you make the kind of work they need. It surfaces the portfolio-page, case-study, and about-page actions that lift the read-through rate against what your category typically does, and it names the reason behind each one so the craft stays with you the next project you publish. It sets the mix of places you show up to fit a studio of one to three people, calibrated to the platforms your buyers scout on, whether that is Dribbble, Behance, LinkedIn or your own newsletter. It teaches you how to build the referral rhythm and the small audience surface that turns the right people into the right enquiries at the right rate, and it walks you through the year-in-design moments when your category buys, so your pipeline lands planned rather than reactive.
You stay in control of how the studio reads, you learn the reasoning behind each one, and you get the eye of a senior marketing executive without losing an ounce of your own taste.
Compass calibrates to your specific business. Each of these has its own page with the actions that fit the work best
Twenty minutes. You answer a handful of quick questions about your studio: what you design, who your clients are, where you already show your work, what your sales cycle looks like. Compass researches your category and surfaces what it finds, then a short guided conversation captures your last great project, the next quarter, what you've tried, and the time and budget you can put behind it.
The free 90 Day Growth Plan lands first: a single on-screen plan personalised to your studio, with the market truth about your category, the client profiles most worth pursuing, the moments that turn an enquiry into a signed project, and a 90 day roadmap of the actions that matter most. Pro turns that into a full 12 month strategy with deeper research, five client profiles instead of two, and a monthly cadence that flexes as your studio grows.
A short daily task list, sized to the time you have, anything from one task to a few, organised by client profile and channel. Some tasks Compass handles for you in the background, such as portfolio-platform monitoring and the mentions of your studio across the design community. The rest are short and clear, designed to fit between project work, with the marketing science behind each task explained in jargon-free language.
Design marketing has its own canon of science: the portfolio mechanics that decide whether a buyer reads to the case study or bounces, the positioning work that lets a studio of three charge what a studio of thirty cannot, the referral compounding that makes one well-served client worth three new conversations, and the year-in-design buying patterns that decide when your category is enquiring vs holding off. Compass applies the science to your studio and names the reason behind every task in plain English, so you learn your marketing craft every day until one day you won't need Compass anymore.
Pro Plan subscription £19 per month for as long as you stay.