Tom Clarke runs Reason8, a web design business that helps firms shape and improve their websites. Clarke's posts discuss typography, website compliance, choosing suitable projects, and lessons from running the business.
22.2K followersBased on 10 posts · latest Oct 2026
Tom Clarke is useful for professional-services website redesigns that connect typography, compliance, and business fit.
Best for
A professional services firm redesigning its website and clarifying its client promise.
Not for
A consumer or DTC brand buying a fixed sponsored-content placement.
Key takeaways
Typeface choice should start with how a business should feel to readers.
They declined an £8,500 project because repeated agency changes suggested a deeper client gap.
Compliance review includes registration numbers, SRA complaints procedures, FCA promotion rules, and accessibility.
Check first: Confirm whether they offer a partnership or paid placement before proposing a campaign.
Main ideas
Choose typography for the impression the business should make · Repeated project failures can point to a problem with the project requirements, not just the agency · Say no to work that does not serve the business
In their posts, they write about how websites express a business’s character, how professional-services firms can miss legal requirements online, and what makes a project or client a poor fit.
They offer practical lessons from running the business, including when a redesign may not address the client’s underlying need.
Their posts are a useful starting point for readers interested in website design and the judgment behind agency work.
Clarke connects website decisions to the business problem they are meant to solve.
In one post, typeface choice starts with how a business should feel to readers, rather than what is trendy or familiar.
In another, they describe declining a £8,500 website project because repeated agency changes suggested a deeper gap between what the client needed and what they requested.
A separate account of lessons from running Reason8 adds counterexamples: e-commerce a business did not need, a rebuild undertaken for visibility rather than improvement, and custom work where a template would be better.
The compliance post broadens the focus beyond design to website obligations for professional-services firms.
Together, these examples show a mix of visual judgment, project-fit skepticism, and attention to practical website risks.
Tom Clarke’s posts treat website design as a business decision, not just a visual one.
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They connect typography to how a firm should feel, argue that a redesign can’t fix a poorly understood brief, and put fit and compliance ahead of simply saying yes to a project.
Choose typography for the impression the business should make
Fonts carry personality, Clarke argues, so choosing them because they’re free, popular or familiar can make businesses look interchangeable.
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Start by deciding how the business should feel to a reader, then choose typography to support that impression.
Clarke contrasts Ferrari’s confident, technical fonts, Aesop’s considered, spare packaging and the unmistakable feel of a Wetherspoons menu. For a financial adviser, the post suggests a steady, considered look; for a law firm, an authoritative but human one.
Repeated project failures can point to a problem with the project requirements, not just the agency
A clear brief and available budget don’t automatically make a project a good fit, Clarke argues.
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When several agencies have struggled with the same client, there may be a gap between what the business needs and what it’s asking for. Taking the job without addressing that gap may cost more in time and effort than it earns.
Clarke declined an £8,500 website project with a six-week timeline because the prospective client had been through four agencies in two years. The repeated agency changes prompted them to question the underlying need before accepting the work.
Reflecting on five and a half years running Reason8, Clarke says low pricing, poor-fit projects and trying too hard to keep clients happy all created costs.
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The lesson isn’t simply to charge more or refuse difficult work: test whether the project solves a real business problem, choose an appropriate scope and build trust rather than relying on being liked.
Clarke cites e-commerce projects for businesses with no business selling online, rebuilds intended mainly to make founders look active, and custom builds where a template would have been better. They also say clients who received concessions on scope, time and cost often left first, while clients turned away often stayed longest.
Treat compliance as part of a professional-services website review
A website redesign needs more than visual and messaging changes, Clarke argues: firms should check the legal and regulatory requirements that apply to their sites.
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The post gives examples by type of firm and points to a short check. Ask for the linked article’s full guidance.
The post flags a company registration number in the footer, full complaints procedures for SRA-regulated firms and the possibility that almost every page on an FCA-regulated firm’s site is a financial promotion. It also mentions accessibility rules coming next.
This explains why typography is a strategic choice rather than decoration, and gives newcomers a clear entry point into Tom Clarke's approach to website work.
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Tom Clarke argues that typefaces carry a business's personality, using Ferrari, Aesop, and Wetherspoons as contrasting examples: confident and technical, considered and premium, or exactly like a Wetherspoons menu.
They say most professional services websites rely on one of five fonts—Inter, Poppins, Manrope, DM Sans, or Open Sans—making them interchangeable.
Their proposed starting question is not what looks nice or trendy, but what the business should feel like when someone reads it.
For brands planning a campaign
A professional services redesign can use font selection as a positioning exercise. Test whether the typography matches the firm's intended feel—steady and considered for a financial adviser, authoritative but human for a law firm—rather than defaulting to a common template font.
This explains how Tom Clarke judges project fit and why a firm might hear no from a web partner, making it a useful read before assessing suitability.
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Tom Clarke describes declining a 5-page website with e-commerce integration, a six-week timeline, and a clear brief because the client was on their fourth agency in two years.
They say the pattern points to a gap between what the client needs and what they are asking for, and that no agency can bridge that gap for £8,500 in six weeks.
Their conclusion: not every enquiry is a good enquiry, and some jobs cost more than they pay.
For brands planning a campaign
For a redesign, ask about the firm's agency history and underlying needs. A firm with repeated failed agency relationships may need positioning and requirements work before a redesign; if so, say that plainly.
This explains what Tom Clarke has learned about client selection and delivery, giving newcomers a direct view of the business judgment behind the website work.
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Tom Clarke lists three mistakes from running Reason8: pricing too low, which attracted more difficult clients; saying yes to projects that were not a fit, including e-commerce jobs for businesses that had no business selling online, rebuilds for founders who wanted to be seen doing something, and custom builds when a template would have been better; and confusing being liked with being trusted by caving on scope, timelines, and costs. They say clients they bent over backwards for often left first, while clients they said no to often stayed longest.
For brands planning a campaign
Use these lessons as a checklist when scoping a professional services redesign: clarify whether e-commerce is justified, whether the project is a real business improvement or a visibility exercise, and whether a custom build is necessary. Set expectations around scope and trust, not likability.
This explains why a professional services website review should include legal and regulatory checks, not only visual or messaging changes.
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Tom Clarke points to common website compliance failures: a missing company registration number in the footer, which the post says breaches the Companies Act; SRA-regulated firms needing to publish their complaints procedure in full, where “available on request” does not count; FCA-regulated firms treating almost every page as a financial promotion; and accessibility rules coming next. The post says a linked article includes a ten-minute check and that most firms fail at least one line.
For brands planning a campaign
Include a compliance and accessibility pass in the redesign brief before launch. For regulated firms, confirm required disclosures and complaints procedures, and treat page content as potential financial promotion where FCA rules apply.
Website compliance for regulated professional-services firms1
Project fit and the cost of saying yes1
Pricing, fit, and trust after five and a half years at Reason81
Typography as a positioning decision
Tom Clarke argues that fonts carry personality and that most agencies pick them because they are free, safe, or trendy.
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The result, in their account, is that many professional-services websites use one of five common fonts and feel interchangeable. Good typography starts with a question — what should this business feel like when someone reads it? — then maps the answer to sectors: a financial adviser, steady and considered; a law firm, authoritative but human; a creative studio, alive and rhythmic; a bakery, warm and hand-made.
Starts with a decision question, then pairs each sector with an emotional register before discussing specific typefaces.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful for a brand evaluating visual identity or planning a website redesign. A brief can ask for a typographic direction tied to stated positioning rather than a current trend, using sample sectors and feelings as a starting point.
Website compliance for regulated professional-services firms
Tom Clarke identifies legal and regulatory requirements that professional-services firms may be breaking without knowing: a company registration number in the footer under the Companies Act; full published complaints procedures for SRA-regulated firms, where 'available on request' does not count; FCA-regulated firms treating almost every page as a financial promotion; and accessibility rules coming next.
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The post points to a ten-minute check and says most firms fail at least one line of it.
For brands planning a campaign
Relevant for compliance-sensitive professional-services campaigns. A brand can ask for a pre-publication website check focused on registration disclosures, complaints handling, financial-promotion risk, and accessibility, rather than a general design review.
Tom Clarke describes turning down £8,500 because the client had been through four agencies in two years.
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They read the pattern as an underlying gap between what the client actually needs and what they are asking for, and argue that not every enquiry is a good enquiry. In their view, some jobs cost more in time and trouble than they pay.
For brands planning a campaign
Relevant for agency-side or service-positioning content about qualification, scoping, and ideal-client fit. A campaign could use this perspective for a piece on when to decline work, how to diagnose repeated agency failures, or how to reframe a brief before accepting it.
Pricing, fit, and trust after five and a half years at Reason8
Tom Clarke lists what they got wrong running Reason8: pricing too low attracted difficult clients rather than better ones; saying yes to poor-fit projects — e-commerce for businesses that had no business selling online, rebuilds for founders who wanted to be seen doing something, custom builds where a template would have been better — cost more than they paid; and confusing being liked with being trusted led to caving on scope and timelines for clients who often left first, while clients they said no to often stayed longest.
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Presents corrections after a sustained period running one business, rather than after a single project or client engagement.
For brands planning a campaign
Useful for retrospective or founder-led content about repositioning, pricing, and boundaries. A brand can ask for lessons framed around specific decisions and their commercial consequences, not abstract advice about saying no.
Across Tom Clarke's posts, they tend to write short first-person accounts, numbered lessons, or a practical check, then name specific sectors, businesses, or project types as examples.
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The pieces move from a problem or question to a concrete action: look for the registration number, ask what the business should feel like, recognise the fourth-agency pattern.
Combines a short first-person scene or list with named examples and a specific next action.
For brands planning a campaign
Suits campaigns that need plainspoken, example-heavy guidance rather than abstract thought leadership. A brief can call for concise posts with a clear takeaway and sector-specific references that a professional-services audience can test against its own website or client base.
Tom Clarke’s posts document one clear business relationship: Reason8, the web design business they say they have been running for five and a half years and whose client work they describe as “our work.”
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The posts name no specific clients, sponsors, affiliates or investment relationships; ask for relevant examples and any commercial ties.
Reason8
Owned business
Tom Clarke says they have spent five and a half years running Reason8 and calls its client website work “our work” in a post about turning down a project.
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The posts present Reason8 as the business they operate; ask them to confirm its formal ownership structure.
Tom Clarke writes about websites as business decisions.
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Start with the typography posts to see how design choices carry a firm’s positioning, then read the compliance post for legal checks that regulated professional-services firms often miss.
The agency lessons on turning down poor-fit work and rethinking pricing show how they evaluate clients, scope, and trust.
Compare their work with Saikat Sarkar on marketing bottlenecks and AI automation, Burhan Arif on performance creative for DTC brands, and James Wilkinson on bespoke websites and CRM for golf clubs.
Both write as web designers and digital marketers, connecting websites, content, CRM, and automation to the customer journey.
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Both favour practical diagnosis over tool buying.
Saikat Sarkar focuses on AI automation, lead qualification, show-up rates, and marketing bottlenecks for small businesses; Tom Clarke focuses on typography, professional-services website compliance, agency pricing, and project fit.
Both started in design and now write about creative work with a commercial job to do.
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Both argue that the creative process should start with the customer’s problem, not what looks good.
Burhan Arif makes performance creative for DTC brands spending large sums on paid social and discusses Meta ads, statics, and emails; Tom Clarke writes about professional-services websites, typography, regulatory checks, and agency-client fit.
Both run or have run website-building work for client organisations and write about bespoke websites, templates, client relationships, and using AI to make custom builds more practical.
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James Wilkinson’s posts centre on golf clubs, golf business CRM, and named club projects; Tom Clarke writes across professional-services firms, with a stronger focus on typography, compliance, and agency project selection.
A buyer can treat Tom Clarke’s LinkedIn following as a reach signal for a professional-services website redesign campaign.
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Their posts do not specify followers’ job roles, employers or seniority.
The measurable audience figure is 22,181 LinkedIn followers observed on 8 October 2026.
Four posts indicate interest in typography and brand feel, regulator-specific compliance requirements, and choosing which agency projects to take.
For a campaign targeting a particular firm type, seniority, occupation or geography, ask for recent audience survey results or a platform demographic breakdown.
Request performance data from recent posts on professional-services website redesign, typography and compliance to compare audience response to those topics.
The posts show no partnership offer from Tom Clarke.
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Across the four posts, Clarke writes as the owner of Reason8, a web design business serving professional services firms — discussing typography choices, website compliance rules, which client projects to turn down, and lessons from five and a half years of running the business.
None of the posts presents a sponsorship package, media kit, rate card, editorial placement, affiliate arrangement, or any other brand-facing partnership format, and none states terms, deliverables, lead times, or operational requirements a buyer would need to plan around.
The posts read as an agency owner speaking to prospective clients about website work, not as a creator offering placements to brands.
This is a documented absence in these posts, not a statement that Clarke never accepts sponsorships or partnerships; the posts simply do not address the question.
For a campaign planner, that means partnership terms cannot be planned from the posts here.
The gap is actionable: a partnership assessment needs Clarke's own sponsor or collaboration disclosures, any published rate or format information, and a verified inquiry route, none of which appear in these posts.
A professional services firm redesigning its website and repositioning itself around a clearer client promise is a strong fit, based on Tom Clarke’s posts.
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Three themes in their published work map directly onto that need.
First, positioning through typography.
Their post on fonts argues that typefaces carry a business’s personality, yet most agencies choose them because they are free, safe or currently popular.
The result: many professional services sites rely on one of five common fonts and look interchangeable.
The post offers a working method, not just a matter of taste: start by asking what the business should feel like when someone reads it, then work out the typographic answer.
It pairs sectors with registers — a financial adviser, steady and considered; a law firm, authoritative but human; a creative studio, alive and rhythmic.
For a firm that looks like its competitors, this is a useful starting point for a repositioning conversation, not a decoration exercise.
See the typography post in Start with their work.
Second, compliance as part of the redesign, not an afterthought.
Their post on website law names specific failures: a missing company registration number in the footer, which the post says breaches the Companies Act; SRA-regulated firms needing to publish a complaints procedure in full, since 'available on request' does not count; FCA-regulated firms treating almost every page as a financial promotion; and accessibility rules coming next.
For a regulated professional services firm, that means including a pre-launch check of required disclosures, complaints handling, financial-promotion exposure and accessibility.
The post points to a longer article with a ten-minute check; request it before finalising the checklist.
Third, qualification before work starts.
Clarke describes declining a 5-page website with e-commerce integration on a six-week timeline because the client was on their fourth agency in two years.
They read the pattern as a gap between what the client needed and what they were asking for.
Their retrospective adds three mistakes from running Reason8: pricing too low; taking projects that were not a fit (including e-commerce for businesses with no real case for selling online, rebuilds for founders who wanted to be seen doing something, and custom builds where a template would have done); and confusing being liked with being trusted by caving on scope and timelines.
For a firm that has already been through one or more failed agency relationships, this points to a short diagnosis of the underlying need before committing to a rebuild.
The audience data is limited to a follower total: 22,181 LinkedIn followers observed on 8 October 2026, with no breakdown by job role, employer, seniority or sector.
If the campaign depends on reaching a specific buyer group, ask for performance data on recent posts about redesign, typography and compliance before committing budget.
When to choose a specialist
A materially different campaign — for example, a consumer or DTC brand buying a paid sponsored-content placement with fixed formats, deliverables, lead times and a rate card — is a poor fit based on the posts.
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The gap is commercial, not topical: the posts do not describe a partnership offer.
Across all four posts, Tom Clarke writes as the owner of Reason8, a web design business serving professional services firms.
The topics are typography choices, website compliance rules, turning down a poorly fitting project and lessons from five and a half years running the business.
None presents a sponsorship package, media kit, rate card, editorial placement, affiliate arrangement or other brand-facing format, and none states terms, deliverables, lead times or operational requirements.
A campaign planner cannot scope a paid placement from these posts; ask Clarke whether they offer one.
The audience data compounds the problem for a consumer campaign.
The only measurable figure is 22,181 LinkedIn followers, with no data on their role, employer, seniority, sector or geography.
The four posts suggest topic appeal among people responsible for professional services websites, pointing towards a business audience rather than a consumer one.
They do not support a consumer reach claim.
If the consumer campaign is still worth pursuing, ask Clarke for any sponsor or collaboration disclosures, published format and rate information, a verified inquiry route, and platform demographic data.
Without those, treat a paid-placement campaign as unsupported and consider them only for the professional services redesign need described above, where the posts document a fit.
A worked campaign example
Worked campaign angle: 'Reposition the firm before repainting it — a typographic direction with a compliance gate.'
Stage 1, diagnosis before design.
Start with the qualification question raised by Clarke’s declined-project post: has the firm been through failed agency relationships, and is the real problem a website rebuild or an unclear position and set of requirements?
Ask for the agency history and previous project scopes.
If the pattern is repeated failure, spend the first phase on positioning and requirements, then commission design.
Also test two decisions flagged in their retrospective: whether a custom build is justified or a template would do, and whether e-commerce has a genuine revenue case or is a founder’s visibility exercise.
Record both answers; they determine scope and cost.
Stage 2, typographic direction.
Run a session based on Clarke’s question — what should this business feel like when someone reads it? — rather than what looks nice or trendy.
Map the firm’s sectors and audiences to registers: steady and considered for financial advisory work, authoritative but human for legal work.
Produce two typographic directions with written rationales tied to those registers, plus a note on where the firm currently sits among widely used professional services fonts and what that costs it in differentiation.
The deliverable is a font system with a rationale a non-designer partner can defend internally.
Stage 3, compliance gate before launch.
Build the pre-launch check from Clarke’s website-law post: confirm the company registration number appears in the footer; for SRA-regulated firms, publish the complaints procedure in full rather than pointing to availability on request; for FCA-regulated firms, review pages against financial-promotion rules rather than assuming only obvious marketing pages are covered; and include accessibility checks.
Request Clarke’s linked article with the ten-minute check before finalising the checklist; it is not among the posts here.
Stage 4, delivery and handoff.
Sequence the work so positioning and compliance findings are in before visual design is locked, and set expectations around scope and trust rather than likability.
Clarke says clients they bent over backwards for often left first, while clients they said no to often stayed longest.
A short next-step brief for the firm: one page covering the diagnosed need, the chosen typographic register and why, the compliance items to fix before launch, and the scope decision on custom versus template.
Before quoting, verify whether Clarke takes on this kind of project directly: the posts describe their agency’s selection decisions, not an inbound client offer.
Also ask for performance data on recent posts about redesign, typography and compliance, since audience composition is undocumented, and request the referenced compliance article.
If the campaign requires a paid creator placement with fixed deliverables and rates, this angle does not apply; the posts do not document that format.
Sarkar is the better choice when the firm's real problem is where prospects fall out of the journey rather than how the site looks.
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Both posts make the same argument: adding another tool (AI, automation, CRM, ads, SEO, another social platform) does not fix a marketing problem.
Start by mapping the path from customer question to content to profile visit to website to enquiry to follow-up to sales call, then apply technology where people are getting stuck.
The second post offers concrete diagnostics: if visitors do not understand the offer, more traffic will not help; if prospects keep asking the same questions, another post will not help; if follow-up takes two days, a new content strategy will not help.
The first post makes a measurement point that matters to a firm buying leads: a dashboard showing 30 booked calls can still hide 20 poor-fit prospects, 6 no-shows and 4 people who never understood the offer.
The metrics to watch are qualified conversations, show-up rate, customer fit and actual enquiries.
If the firm's need shifts from repositioning and visual identity to lead handling and follow-up friction, Sarkar addresses the decision the firm actually faces; Tom Clarke's typography and compliance material does not.
Tom Clarke's posts do not cover the two things the professional services brief centres on: what a business should feel like when someone reads it (Clarke's typographic method) and the regulatory layer — registration number in the footer, publishing an SRA complaints procedure in full, treating FCA-regulated pages as financial promotions, and accessibility rules.
Sarkar's two posts cover web and funnel content for small businesses generally, with no posts describing work inside regulated professional services, so the compliance argument for choosing Clarke stands unchallenged.
The comparison covers only two posts and includes no audience figures.
Ask whether Sarkar takes on client projects and what form they would take.
Arif is the better choice when the engagement is paid-social creative for a product business and the deliverable is ads, not a website.
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The posts describe building performance creative for direct-to-consumer brands after running personal e-commerce stores and losing money on them, and name the scale of that work: statics and emails at volume for brands spending heavily on paid social.
The transferable part for the same buyer decision is method.
Arif writes that the mistake was looking at an ad from a designer's perspective ('does this look good?') when the customer only asks whether it solves their problem.
For paid-social creative assignments, they dig into reviews, comments, competitors, objections and buying triggers before opening design tools, because the best creative ideas sit in the customer's words rather than the assignment.
If the professional services firm redirects budget from a redesign into demand generation through paid social, that customer-language-first approach is directly usable; Clarke's website typography work is not.
The posts cover DTC e-commerce paid social, a different channel, product and buyer from those of a regulated professional services firm.
Neither touches websites, brand typography, industry regulation or B2B lead generation.
The stated output — statics and emails delivered at volume for high-spend consumer accounts — is not the same deliverable as a firm's website, so a planner cannot treat the pair as a like-for-like comparison.
The comparison covers two posts, with no audience data, published commercial formats or rate information; treat it as topical, not as a confirmed substitute.
Wilkinson is the better choice when the buyer is a membership venue — specifically, a golf club — that wants a bespoke-looking site on a budget that historically could not fund one, bundled with the systems around it.
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The first post explains why so many club websites look the same: bespoke builds were too expensive, staff costs were high and club budgets low, an in-house web team was closed, and only one site sold for more than £10,000.
It sets out what changed: using AI coding tools to build bespoke sites in weeks, using the club's own imagery, SEO and answer-engine optimisation from the start, connecting to CRM and AI concierge tools, creating AI video from the club's photography, drafting blogs in the club's tone of voice, and providing a CMS the club can update without waiting on a developer.
The second post covers the adoption side of a CRM rollout, where the blocker was the team's fear of change and the learning curve rather than the software; Wilkinson addressed it with training materials built alongside the client.
For a golf or leisure club deciding between a bespoke site and another template, Wilkinson addresses the exact tradeoff.
Clarke's material on typographic personality and regulatory pages targets a different sector and does not answer the budget-versus-bespoke question.
All the posts cover golf and holiday-park clubs, so their relevance to a regulated professional services firm is unproven.
They contain no compliance content (registration number, SRA complaints handling, FCA financial-promotion rules, accessibility) or typographic repositioning of the kind the firm needs.
The comparison covers two posts and includes no audience figures or published commercial terms.
Ask about availability and fit for the specific engagement.
This profile is based on four LinkedIn posts by Tom Clarke: one on typography and brand feel, one on turning down an £8,500 website project, one on lessons from five and a half years running Reason8, and one on website compliance for professional services firms.
The posts do not show publication dates, so this profile cannot show how Clarke's views have developed over time.
Clarke's LinkedIn following is reported as 22,181, observed on 8 October 2026; no breakdown by job role, employer, seniority, or sector was available.
The compliance article Clarke links to in the website-law post is not available in the posts, so readers should request it rather than rely on a summary here.
No books, shows, or earlier work appear in the posts that might also explain searches for this name, so it remains unclear whether other work is associated with the name.
The similar-creator comparisons use two posts each from Saikat Sarkar, Burhan Arif, and James Wilkinson, dated between 24 August and 8 October 2026.
The two campaign examples and the worked campaign angle on this page are examples for readers working through the fit question; they are not client engagements and were not run against a real campaign plan.
The posts show Clarke's work and views, but do not verify employers, credentials, or commercial terms beyond those posts, and no partnership formats, rates, or inquiry route appear in the posts.
