Our history

Simply Put from Andrew Steeds on Vimeo.

Simply Put first started out in 2001, as a partnership between an educational publisher and an adult literacy and numeracy consultant. Working together on a series of publications, they had felt that their two disciplines had much to offer each other, with one looking at communication from the perspective of the message and the other from that of its recipient. At its best, publishing was an attempt to communicate as clearly and engagingly as possible to a range of readers; adult literacy and numeracy hinged on the need to adjust messages to the varying abilities and needs of learners.

Since 2001, Simply Put has worked with clients from all sectors – corporate, government, voluntary. We have no single method of working that we try to impose on our clients, and would not presume to do so in any case. We are much keener to help our clients to do what they had been planning to do, but to do so more clearly, more simply and more engagingly than they may have felt able to beforehand. To this end, we spend a lot of time before working on new projects listening to our clients explain what they are trying to do, and looking at the writing they have produced.

Since 2004, Simply Put has been a limited company. It is still run by one of its two founding partners, Andrew Steeds, and it continues to bring in a range of different experts – designers, editors, web engineers, printers, photographers – depending on the nature of each job.

We are still happy to work with any client open-minded enough to feel that we might have something to offer them. And our principles remain the same: to cut through all the unnecessary stuff that gets in the way of the clear communication of a particular message to a particular group of readers – so that both sides feel that they have gained something from the experience.