A little background

I was born in the East End of London and spent much of my early years living in North East London. In 1985 I moved to Toronto, Canada, where I lived and worked for about seventeen years. I am a designer and digital imaging consultant and have over 20 years experience in the field. I have focused my attention since my return to London in late 2002 on setting up a consultancy specializing in providing creative and I.T. services. Although trained in traditional methodologies, I now work primarily with digital tools and have a good deal of experience with a variety of hardware platforms, from early Apple, Atari, and Amiga systems to Pentium, Power Mac and SGI workstations. I currently work on both Windows Mac OS based systems.

As a designer I consider myself an artist. The creative spark is one which if allowed to run free can overwhelm the designer, we as designers learn to temper that impulse through reasoning. Although in general it is thought that creative people hate the idea of science, I believe that design is a science as well as an applied art. The science is one of combining creative impulses and reasoning to solve problems.We are artists in our use of media and in how elegantly we resolve the design problem.

My knowledge of design has come from many years of experience, schooling and working closely with developers in the digital imaging field. My knowledge of traditional and contemporary design methodologies and technologies have enabled me to service an extensive array of clients. I have also traveled the world demonstrating and educating other designers and artists in this field.

I have designed identity programs and logos, fonts, software interfaces, multimedia, content and icons for applications, animations for product renderings, CD artwork for music and software release, memorable web experiences and digital artwork, and a plethora of other design projects. I am fully conversant with Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere, Illustrator and After Effects, as well as Dreamweaver and font creation tools such as Fontographer and Font Lab. I have also spent a good deal of time photographing events, musicians and landscapes both professionally and for artistic expression.

I also write product reviews which can be a lot of fun and helps keep me in the loop as far as new products and technologies are concerned.

Activities & Interests

I am interested in the fields of alternative energy and technology, architecture, art and design, computer animation, graphics and special effects, dance, film, martial arts, music, science (fact, fantasy and fiction), type design, travel and also collect art, photography and comic books. I also thoroughly enjoy action sports like paintball, airsoft skirmishing and off-road biking.

Artistic Influences:

* Artists of the Art Nouveau, Vienna Secession and Pre-Raphaelite movements.
* David Carson, Neville Brody, Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
* Mike Mignola, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Ashley Wood, Dave McKean, John Van Fleet, Jeffery Jones and Michael Kaluta.

Literary Influences:

* John Ronald Ruell Tolkien
* Howard Phillips Lovecraft
* Arthur Conan Doyle
* Joseph Campbell