Work
I’m an experienced website administrator and graphic designer. I’m currently employed at Time Electronics working on in-house marketing projects for industrial electronic products.
In the early 2000s I moved to London working as a freelance website designer and producer. I specialised in promotional websites for photographers and makeup artists. I found this work by joining a quirky little studio named Eyeball on Pentonville Road near Kings Cross. These sites were made with HTML4 and Flash and GIF animation.
Following this, I spent some time at Incisive Media working as an in-house website producer. This job was maintaining and developing visual design and content on their many websites associated with financial market magazine publishing. By this time in 2007 I’d moved out of London to Tunbridge Wells. I tried commuting for a year and didn’t like it so I found a local job at Eonic. This was a website development agency situated in the old High Street in Tunbridge Wells. During this time I progressed to a project manager role liasing with sales, clients and the development team. As a side interest I studied and practiced Search Engine Optimisation
Due to my interest in mountain biking, I moved on to a website administrator role at Nikwax & Páramo. Nikwax makes aftercare products for outdoor gear. Páramo designs and makes outdoor apperal. During this time I worked on ecommerce management, email and pay per click advertising plus social media management.
As website content management systems progressed, I became interested in the possibilities of WordPress. In 2012 I became a full time freelancer using WordPress. Much of this work was in collaboration with design agencies who would provide graphic design and direction. During this time I mostly worked with Hop House Design, Charlotte Delmonte and Door22 plus other clients that came directly.
In 2018 I volunteered as a Brighton WordCamp organiser. My roles in this were website build and event photographer. WordCamp is WordPress event, a bit like a conference that’s held every year in cities around the world. I became involved in Brighton WordCamp from attending monthly WordPress meetups in Brighton as a way to meet like minded people.
After 7 years of working from home I was keen to get back in to a more sociable environment. I joined Time Electronics in 2019 as an in-house graphic designer. It was the start of a big project to revamp all of the company marketing assets. During this time I learned product photography in a purpose made studio to reshoot the entire product range. This was part of an extensive website project on timeelectronics.com to bring it to where it is at present. As part of this role I also work on printed material including labels, user manuals and brochures.
Personal
I grew up in Crowborough, East Sussex near the edge of the Ashdown Forest. As a teen, I became obsessed with skateboarding. When I wasn’t in school, I spent most of my time with friends skateboarding in car parks and on insubstantial ramps. We acquired poor quality VHS videos about skateboarding and became interested in the punk and new wave music soundtracks. Images and music associated with skateboarding got me interested in art. When the school careers adviser suggested I went to art college I liked the idea and went for it. During my year of GCSE retakes, my art teacher from the year before helped me make a portfolio. I was offered a place at Hastings College of Art and Technology and attended there for a couple of years. From there I moved on to a Degree course for Art Design and Media at the University of Portsmouth. During this time I led a fairly bohemian life of art college, clubs, raves and more skateboarding in Southsea, a typical British seaside town area on the edge of the city of Portsmouth.
During my final year at Portsmouth I met Claire who was sharing a flat with my sister in Bournemouth. Following the end of my degree, I moved to Bournemouth to be with Claire and we started our lives together. We got married about 4 years later and are still together now. During our first year in Bournemouth, Claire was finishing her Media Production degree. She made several documentaries during this time and I enjoyed helping out on the shoots.
At the end of Claires degree we decided we need to be nearer London for our careers and moved to Tunbridge Wells. During this time I became interested in design for websites and started learning Photoshop and HTML. After a few years I’d learned enough to start working in website design and by this time we’d moved to central London. Firstly Old Street and then Shepherds Bush. When our careers were a bit more established we moved back to Tunbridge Wells. This was the time when I started mountain biking. I’d dabbled a little in the 90s but being nearer the countryside and needing exercise, I decided to by a used bike and start riding.
I got obsessed with mountain biking in the same way I had with skateboarding and have been riding as often as possible ever since. This has included amateur downhill and xc racing. In 2012 I joined Bedgebury Forest Cycle Club and in 2022 qualified as a British Cycling Level 1 coach. I currently teach juniors mountain biking on Saturday mornings as part of BFCC. I’m also on the committee of the club and maintain the website. All cycle club activities are non-profit. These include trail building, cross country racing at Bedgebury, coaching and club rides. Club rides are at Bedgebury Forest also Surrey Hills, Friston Forest and the South Downs National Park