So what do I do?
Some call themselves standards-based designers, some even call themselves CSS developers, I don’t know what to call myself these days – the work I do spans the realms of usability, interface and accessibility consultation, analytics and conversion reporting, hardcore CSS/xHTML standards-based semantic coding, PHP programming, and last but not least at all – desinging. And despite being an awesome coder, my designs are far from predictable. Let’s just call me a web expert. I can design sites, build them, and fix them, that’s all that matters.
A lot of the recent design work I’ve done has won awards and been featured on showcase sites, and while it is this area of things that I enjoy the most, I do genuinely love getting my hands dirty with the code too. I also like to speak about my work, and have talked on various podcasts and at local conferences about CSS, design and its intricacies. Some day I hope to finish the book I’m writing and talk at some of the more major events.
Enough about design, what about you?
I’m pretty young I guess, 25 years old and in the prime of life. I grew up in a small seaside town called Bognor Regis, located on the south coast of England. I’ve fond memories of the place but it’s definitely smalltown. I’ve lived in various places in Sussex since, and have now settled slightly off of the coast in the lovely city of Chichester.
I’ve always had a worrying fascination with guns, since about the age of 4. Luckily this has manifested itself in a healthy liking for FPS (First Person Shooter) games, and not on a murderous rampage. I’ve always been a bit too competitive, too, especially in sports. I played football (or soccer, as my American readers may know it) competitively for most of my childhood, and I did pretty well, but by 13 I was bored and turned to something with a little more adrenalin – aggressive skating. I progressed pretty quickly and was soon sponsored by a local shop and entering competitions. Again I got bored pretty quickly and turned to basketball, playing for the school team and winning a pretty big Adidas tournament with a chap from school. It didn’t go anywhere quick enough though so I got bored again and moved on. Tennis, golf, BMXing, squash, snooker, pool, darts, hocking… I played them all to a point where I was pretty darn good, but never the best, and then I gave up. At the very least, nowadawys I can hold my own if I ever decide to play any recreational sport, heh.
Don’t you rap or something?
After sports I turned to music, and had a reasonably successful stab at a career in it in 2004, with my first demo CD landing me a place on a hit TV show on Channel 4 (if you don’t live in the UK, we had 4 main TV channels here until very recently, and that was one of them). The TV show was great fun, they flew 6 of us out to New York for 3 weeks to record and album, play a gig and get a feel for what it’s like in the music industry over there. It helped me loads, and my first ever gig on stage ended up with me rapping in front of over 20,000 people at the MTV HipHopOpen festival in Germany, which was very surreal. I was on stage just after Xzibit for Christ’s sake. Mental. Anyway we all got back home and Ministry of Sound offered us a record deal, we stupidly declined it thinking we could get a better deal, and we never did. Some say our manager was pissed at us turning the deal down so sabotaged the other deals we had lined up, but I don’t care enough anymore to speculate.
So after that I got a full-time job as a print designer, and it was awesome. It was a small firm and I represented them at networking events, giving talks and mingling with hotels full of MDs. Not bad for a 21 year old boy from Bognor. 3 years later I’m a Creative Director at a Chichester agency, but still doing the same sort of thing, only web design this time. The company I’m with (youlove.us) are widely recognised as one of the UK’s best and we’re pulling in the sort of client list that non-London firms could only dream of.