I have been commissioning freelance designers for over a decade, and once you find a good one, you tend to want to hang on to them. Nicola is one of those, being an ever-reliable pair of hands that can be trusted with any project, particularly our highly illustrated reference books and guidebooks. She produces attractive designs, understanding the audience for each book and interpreting the best way to present information. She has lots of great ideas and working with her is always a very pleasant collaborative experience.

Nicola is an author’s dream designer. I have worked with her, on and off, for some twenty-five years, including on an extremely complex illustrated atlas for Dorling Kindersley. Every book of mine that she has designed has exhibited her signature elegant taste. The book we are doing together at present, on symbolism in art for Unicorn Publishing, is challenging from a design point of view, but she has come up with some brilliant solutions to present the material in a way that precisely meets my brief. She is endlessly patient about my changes of mind. Above all, I feel she is as committed as I am to produce the book to the highest possible standard.

Nicola was one of a core team that was recruited when Dorling Kindersley Cartography was set up – a venture that included, most notably, the DK Eyewitness Travel Guides as well as the many atlases and reference books produced by the unit. She became a central figure in the design and conception of what was an innovative approach to geographical information publishing. Nicola’s vision, professionalism, dedication and ingenuity were absolutely essential to the success of the many titles DK Cartography produced, and she is an original and creative designer, capable of producing a variety of solutions to the most complex of publishing challenges.

Nicola is an absolute delight to work with, with an obviously high level of skill and experience in designing books. Those abilities shone through with the wonderful work she did on my research study of the Short-eared Owl, a 432-page book which I self-published in 2021; it attained a standard way above what I thought possible and Nicola's design gave the data and research observations style and accessibility. So much so that I am now utilising her skills on a further book, one that includes a high number of data tables, and her work on that demonstrates, yet again, the broad width of her design capabilities.

I’ve worked with Nicola for many years at several publishers, including Dorling Kindersley, Readers' Digest and Bloomsbury. Nicola has an innate sense of elegance as a designer and we have produced some beautiful books of which I remain very proud. These include a huge, innovative World Atlas for DK and later a series of highly illustrated natural history, sport and historical titles for Bloomsbury. Nicola is excellent at taking a brief and producing designs that reflect the subject and flavour of a book. She is not afraid to express an opinion if she feels that something is not working and make suggestions to put it right. I would recommend her most highly as a designer and as a great person to work with.