I have, this morning (it’s 11.59am on New Years Eve in Dublin, where I’ve arrived jet-lagged and shivering with cold, after two months enjoying a mostly-mild Aussie summer and a prawn-filled poolside Christmas with my family and friends back home in Canberra)…sat down to briefly review my business marketing and pick out points for improvement in 2026.
While checking out Origami Graphics’ Google ranking, I found a blog post from Region.com.au discussing the Best Graphic Designers in Canberra. Instantly I thought to myself, “WAIT, WHY DIDN’T THEY ASK ME IF I WANTED TO BE ON THIS LIST?????”, before quickly realising it was probably a sponsored post, and that those listed would likely have paid to boost their own SEO.
More importantly, I also realised that the blog post was actually published in May 2009.
I was thirteen.
I hadn’t even used Photoshop yet – I got that and my first drawing tablet (a Wacom Intuos3) for my 14th birthday later that year. So I guess I can forgive them for not listing 13-year-old Tay with the Canberra design agencies of the late 2000s.
But it did make me think about everything that’s happened since 2009, and how I’ve got where I am today – running a (mostly) freelance graphic design business that’s technically based in Canberra Australia, while frequently digital nomadding all around the world.
Let’s get into it. The story is long.
People ask me quite often how I got into this job – I say I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.
As long as I can remember, I have been drawing. My earliest memories of this are watching Channel Ten’s Cheez TV, as well as Cartoon Network’s late night Toonami and Adult Swim (where were my parents? lol). Dragon Ball Z, then Sailor Moon, Inuyasha, and all the like splashed across my screen in vibrant animated colour – raising me from the outset with the idea that art meant storytelling. Darkly, I actually remember when 9/11 happened, because the cartoons were cancelled the morning of September 12, 2001 – replaced by the news footage of the tower remains.
My mum (cheers, Michelle!) made sure my language development was top-rate by reading novels to me every night, and I think this did wonders for my imagination, too. My strongest storybook memory is tackling all the Harry Potters together as they were released, and being enthralled by the dragon on the front of Goblet of Fire.
This all started when I was about five years old – so you could say I’m like the(humblebrag) Taylor Swift of graphic designers, already sure what she wanted to do and handing out her albums to record labels at 12 years old. Or the pro athlete of art, needing to start at four to be able to peak in their twenties before their body gives out at thirty-two. Just… Canberran. And not athletic at all.
While I wasn’t intentionally training my skills to build a career, I’m an art girl, and I’ve always been an art girl. I used to come home from school every day, set up at the dining table with wads of paper beholden with my dad’s ugly, burgundy business logo letterhead from the 1990s (I redesigned it in 2015), and draw until it was time for dinner. To my mum’s dismay, if an artwork wasn’t perfect I’d scrunch it up and throw it out.
This perfection-or-trash approach was ruthless, but it showed that my quality discernment and strong drive for improvement were already there. I ended up developing into an entirely self-taught artist and breaking subject records at my school. I got my first drawing tablet and a Photoshop subscription in early high school, and spent all my spare time creating digital paintings, uploading fanart to DeviantArt, and listening to Kelly Clarkson and early conservatorship-era Britney Spears.
Then in Year 12, I landed an ATAR of 98.7 doing just Double English, Visual Art, and Design and Graphics – something that’s still one of my proudest achievements, because graphics and art still do not scale well in 2025. I also missed out on a scholarship to the University of New South Wales art school by 0.3 percentage points (you needed to get 99 or above) and was sad about it, but life goes on.
As it turns out, I didn’t like that uni much anyway.
I Hated Art School So Much (like, so much.)
I used to have arguments with my art teacher at school, because she wanted me to think conceptually – but I just wanted to refine my technical skills and make a pretty drawing.
There was this one time where I drew a scaly dragon, poised to pounce with long talons, vicious slit eyes, and steam flaring out of its nostrils; and Teach suggested I glue magazine pieces onto it to turn it into a comment about beauty standards or something of the like. I know you’ve just gotta do what you gotta do to make the grade, but I was laser-focused on my dragon and exasperated by the suggestion. Bless her, honestly, because she probably knew I was capable of the conceptual stuff but just needed me to show the evidence she needed to grade it. Sorry Mrs Yates!
For some reason, I thought art school would be different; and that once I was free from high school, I’d be drawing and painting to my heart’s content with likeminded university students and beautiful, quality, no-school-budget-restrictions-to-be-seen visual art supplies. Enamoured with the UNSW College of Fine Arts (COFA) (now UNSW Art and Design) campus, its staggered concrete bleachers, its spacious cafe, and its rainbow bean bags, I was hideously excited to move from Canberra to Sydney and start turning art into my career. Enrolling in Bachelor of Design with a side of PR and Marketing, off I went, confident that this was the start of the rest of my life as a graphic designer and artist.
I lasted a year… somehow.
I found art school deeply pretentious, offensively competitive, and sorely lacking in technical instruction. One tutor suggested that we should enrol in a night course if we wanted to learn design programs or drawing skills. The assertion was that art school was for developing thinking, not vocational training. Another tutor suggested I drop out and enrol at TAFE if I wanted to practise something like life drawing.
My optimistic visions went out the window – again, I felt the art was all about the concepts and your ability to BS a rationale, instead of practical function and spectacular visual effect. I failed a unit (my first and only academic failure ever) for suggesting that Peter Alexander was a visionary designer for turning pyjamas from a coffee-stained afterthought into a luxury, sought-after product in the Aussie brand ecosystem. Meanwhile, my classmates did projects on Vera Wang and Alexander McQueen and passed easily. I still think that’s crazy, because by choosing an unusual designer to analyse instead of the same-old, I thought I was showing the critical thinking they would like.
“We’re starting to see who’s got what it takes and who doesn’t”, a senior male tutor said once, “so choose your group project partners carefully.”
Yeah, nah.
(Disclaimer: LOVED my marketing and journalism units at the main UNSW campus. It wasn’t the whole uni, just the art school which was not a fit for me.)
In hindsight, it’s clear that I was a practical entrepreneur at heart, and that’s why I didn’t enjoy fine art instruction.
The acclaim didn’t mean much. I didn’t want to be sought after in a gallery, and I didn’t want to be working in the Eastern Suburbs putting installations in rich folks’ homes. What I wanted was to be designing for businesses, illustrating storybooks with rich, vibrant, beautiful, imaginative artworks, and making graphics that are enjoyable to look at and make life more fun. I don’t think it always needs to be deeper than that!
(Oh, also, living in the Big City was too stressful and I was miserable. I learnt pretty quick that Canberra is actually more my speed. Sorry Sydney! Classic born-and-bred Canberran move.)
I was disheartened by this stage, had been struggling with very poor mental health for a couple of years, and honestly was not having a very good time generally at nineteen years old. So in early 2015, I took a semester off to rest and work part-time, travelled Japan with my Best Buds, and then re-enrolled in a Bachelor of Psychology/Bachelor of Arts dual deal at the University of Canberra.
And ohmygod. Loved it. UC, my fave, to this day.
Suddenly I was doing (within my arts degree) the design subjects I wanted – immersing myself into technical tools, actually coding websites from scratch, learning how to use Google Analytics and manage a blog, designing a book with a deep-dive into Adobe InDesign. In Psychology, I thrived on the science behind the statistics and HD’d most of my subjects, smashing through Motivation and Emotion in particular. For my second Arts major, I went with Japanese (I know, shocking) and learnt cross-institutionally at ANU. It turned out that moving back home to Canberra was the best decision I could possibly have made, and for 5 years I spent all my time studying my favourite things and – also, just for fun – running and styling a vegan food blog.
Barely went to class, though. Did most of my coursework online. Again, given my 100% remote job now, perhaps this preference shouldn’t have been a shock. LOL
So when did all this become Origami Graphics?
It was early 2018; I was still studying, while working part-time as a bartender and receptionist. I’d started having people ask me to do Design Stuff when they found out I was a graphic design student. The requests were getting frequent enough that I wondered if I could side-hustle graphic and web design, instead of doing hospo for $23 per hour.
I registered the business as Origami Graphics (why the name?: Well… it combines design and Japanese, so there) when I was housesitting for my friend, bored and barely able to talk ’cause I’d just had my tonsils out. When I graduated from uni in mid-2019, I took the business full time, and I haven’t looked back since. Nor have I changed my registered address from the ACT!
The funny thing about starting a business as a student, though, is that you have no idea what you’re doing.Sometimes I wish I’d got a full time job for a year or two before full-timing Origami Graphics. I would have had a way better feel for how a business runs and what I should have been charging – as a brand-new designer, I started out matching my bartending rate of $23 per hour. Idiot, Taylor. IDIOT.
To be honest, I’m still feeling the impacts of starting out priced too low in 2018. Every year I realise I’m undercharging for how much I offer and how hectic it all feels, an inevitable price rise blog post comes out, and then I have to inch my rates up that little bit more instead of just having started off strong.
But wow, I’ve learnt a lot. I’ve figured out how taxes work, registered for GST in the middle of 2021 (2 years into full-time!), learnt how to do business marketing, got good at SEO (see above: in the top 3 results for “Graphic Designer Canberra” alongside that listing from 2009), and I now make enough of an income that I’ve been able to work full-time while travelling the world since the end of 2022. I’ve also trained and supervised three interns, and engaged five freelance designers to casually help me from time to time with a workload which has got too large for me to manage 100% on my own.
And you know what else? Having started Origami Graphics in 2018 at a super approachable hourly rate, while financially slow, meant I’ve slowly, intentionally, and with stability and consistency – built hundreds of client relationships that are still thriving today. It’s not all bad!
As we head into 2026 and Origami Graphics reaches its eighth birthday on the 31st of March (EIGHT!!!!!!!!!!!), I still sometimes feel behind. I haven’t done what my peers did, I don’t own property yet, and the early years of clueless new-grad solo business ownership after a five-year double degree with a 6-month break in it, meant my salary was low while others my age progressed quickly in their careers. But success is success. I think I’m starting to catch up financially anyway; the privilege of extended travel is not lost on me, and – to be honest – if five-year-old Taylor Eggleton knew what I was doing now, I think she’d be thrilled.
Chase your dreams, gang. You can do that thing you want to do with persistence, drive, and strategy. Happy new year from the Emerald Isles, and you can catch me back designing in Canberra full-time from July 2026.
– Tay