I am passionate about interactive media, and in an age of digital I believe bringing design to life with code is essential. So, I specialise in a multi-disciplined approach to my work incorporating design and development.
A full-time freelancer, I’m 28 and currently based in Cambridgeshire in the UK.
I studied at the University of Sunderland, where I gained a 1st Class BA Hons in Design: Multimedia and Graphics. It was during my studies where I met my wife, Erin; with whom I now share a beautiful baby son.
My work crosses a broad range of categories in the digital space, both from a design and a technical perspective. I believe in using the right tools for the job so don’t subscribe to following bandwagons. By analysing the job at hand for what it is, you can make informed decisions to ensure the right tools are used to solve the creative problem.
The focus of my work shifts as the need arises for certain skills in the working environment. This can be both a positive and negative experience, on the one hand you can hone your skills in an in-demand area, but on the other hand you’re ready to explore different areas. This is why I explore ideas and concepts outside of my work so I always have something new to share.
At work I’m known for my love of extracurricular activity! I enjoy creating side projects outside of my working life to share and engage with others. This can be through competitions, websites or games. Work makes up such a big part of our lives and I believe in expanding my ideas and skills without needing it to be on a client brief.
Design and development are both creative pursuits, and in digital, one couldn’t exist without the other. Having said that I find joy in development by bringing design to life, which is why I wouldn’t classify myself as ‘hardcore developer’ but instead one that can bridge two philosophies and ways of thinking. Say ‘no’ to pigeon holing!
My work doesn’t end with the brief. Going above and beyond the parameters that have been set out is essential, not only for your own personal achievement and development but it reflects back into the work you produce for clients.
I build both small and large scale applications in JavaScript daily for desktop, tablet or mobile. Combined with an in-depth understanding of UX and design means I can take applications from start to finish. I can also provide knowledgeable feedback and advice on solutions.
Adept with popular frameworks such as jQuery I’m also equipped with the knowledge of a plethora of API’s from Google Maps and YouTube to Facebook and Charts - you name it!
Example Project: Pudding Rush
43% 24 7s javascript /images/made/0c359e01d6d8ae1a/planet-texture-javascript_526_526_c1.jpgWith new concepts, ideas and tools entering the space all the time, HTML and CSS are not to be underestimated. The latest HTML-5 and CSS3 technologies combined with a whole host of new abilities such as appcache, local database, history, canvas, and 3D means there is now a goldmine of tools; perfect for making the latest and greatest web apps and building superb sites designed for users no matter what device they are on.
61.1% 27 10s htmlcss /images/made/0c359e01d6d8ae1a/planet-texture_526_526_c1.gifI'm a pro when it comes to the pen tool. I focus on vector illustration, it's a favourite destination for my work and I'm highly skilled in Adobe Illustrator (although I admit I did favour Macromedia Freehand back in the day).
Example Project: Digital Landscape
65.1% 38 15s illustration /images/made/0c359e01d6d8ae1a/planet-texture-illustration_526_526_c1.jpgNo designer's toolkit would be complete without Photoshop. I've been using Photoshop since the days when AOL would mail you installation disks every week!
29.9% 42 20s photoshop /images/made/0c359e01d6d8ae1a/planet-texture-photoshop_526_526_c1.jpgPHP is a growing skill which I build in regularly. I've worked with a number of frameworks including Wordpress and ExpressionEngine to custom builds. Admittedly, I have a huge preference towards being able to bring things to life, so back-end technologies play second fiddle to that. Where I can tie them all together – that’s the space I enjoy.
Example Project: Adam Hartwig
18.8% 27 30s php /images/made/0c359e01d6d8ae1a/planet-texture-php_526_526_c1.gifI'm adept in Adobe After Effects/Premiere and video production and have great fun using it. It's a skill I don't often get asked to use by clients, but one that I've spent time developing personally.
87.1% 29 40s video /images/made/0c359e01d6d8ae1a/planet-texture_526_526_c1.jpgThere is a huge focus from my clients on web apps and native apps right now. On the web I'm highly skilled when it comes to tablet and mobile, taking advantage of everything devices have to offer such as hardware acceleration, appcache and local database support.
Natively, I work primarily in cross compilers such as Titanium to target multiple platforms at once.
Example Project: Durham Landslide App
6.5% 22 60s apps /images/made/0c359e01d6d8ae1a/planet-texture-apps_526_526_c1.jpgWith more than eight years experience using it – you could say Flash is like an old friend! It undeniably opened me up to a world of possibilities prior to the new age of browser abilities.
It invariably became a great stepping stone when the web caught up. Although it's rare I work within it these days, it's still a strong skill that permeates through my work. I'm fully equipped in AS3 OOP, a vast amount of frameworks including Papervision 3D, and I'm able to confidently produce small and large scale applications.
100% 23 110s flash /images/made/0c359e01d6d8ae1a/planet-texture-flash_526_526_c1.jpgCitak Rugs Inc are a Canadian based importer and distributor of the most exceptional and distinct rugs in the world. I was approached by their team to bring their website to the forefront of web techniques and technologies, for desktop, tablet and mobile.
A solo project, I designed and produced all aspects of the site from concept to creation. The site utilizes various advanced HTML5 techniques and technologies such as WebGL, and also incorporates a number of different methods for navigation and interactions, such as swipe, pinch-to-zoom, and keyboard interactions.
With a minimalist and clean 'deceptively simple' approach, the application is built onto Backbone JS (incl. Marionette), and uses additional frameworks such as three.js, GSAP and jQuery. The site is setup with a heavy emphasis on mobile and tablet functionality to ensure a smooth experience cross-platform, while also incorporating a number of polyfill and graceful degradation behaviours, such as WebGL enhancements, CSS transforms and so on.
When a New York catering company approached me last year and asked if I'd like to work with them, little did I know at the time that it would become one of my biggest projects to date; it overhauled the entire way I work, I explored and worked with technologies that I rarely had a chance to work with, and it amounted to over 30,000 lines of handwritten JavaScript.
Read the full article at CSS Design Awards.
Jumping Pages are specialists in animated stories, events, games, apps and children’s play spaces.
I was approached to work with Jumping Pages to produce an intermediary new site for them; but they loved the new site so much it became their final one!
I produced all aspects of the site, from concept to creation, gearing it towards tablet and mobile devices. Featuring a web app framework, site navigation is powered by cached AJAX JSON feeds to create a seamless browsing experience.
Pete Nottage is a UK voiceover and presenter, a Channel 4 continuity announcer, the voice of BBC6 Music, writer and audio producer.
Pete approached me to create a small new interactive site to convey his personality and work, featuring a fun and quirky illustrative approach.
I produced all aspects of the site, from concept to creation. The site features an illustrative responsive virtual city that morphs and changes based on the size of the web browser window.
The site was awarded Site of the Day on CSSDA.
I was approached to work with Starworks Artists to produce a new upgraded version of their site, with the aim of it being a cross platform and slick new experience.
I produced all aspects of the development and UX of the site from the ground up, with additional input into the overall design in elements such as the lightbox. The site is geared heavily towards tablet and mobile devices, implementing HTML5 technologies such as tilting mechanisms that respond to the way the screen is tilted in iOS devices.
Structurally, the site is designed to behave as a ‘web app’ experience, utilising AJAX and JSON data to asynchronously load consequent pages of the site by requesting a tiny JSON-ified version of the target page and compiling the page at run time. This acts to reduce loading overheads, and to also make the application behave as efficiently and smoothly as possible. For SEO purposes, all pages of the site exist in two forms; the HTML page output itself, and a JSON version which only contains the core content of the page to compile at run-time (the page is able to switch dynamically as to the form of the content it serves).
In terms of mobile, the site also has the ability to alter the content that is served; as it’s quite an image heavy site, it alternates between serving the full size images, and for mobile, a reduced version of the same image to avoid loading images that won’t be taken advantage of and increase load times on small screens.
The site is fully hardware accelerated, which ensures smooth transitioning cross platform, particularly on mobile/tablet devices.
Starworks Artists was produced in collaboration with Starworks Group, and Rich Banks.
Pudding Rush is an interactive JavaScript/HTML5 Christmas game, designed for tablet and desktop. To celebrate the Christmas festivities, and as a chance to experiment outside of live projects; I decided to pursue the concept of a cooking-style game in which you are tasked with creating the British tradition of Christmas Pudding from start to finish. To give it a competitive edge, user's are timed in the process and offered to submit their time to a global leader board upon completing.
Produced for Omobono as a project mostly in my spare time, Pudding Rush was aimed to engage with our clients across the globe, presenting possibilities of interesting methods of user interaction to bring back into live projects, but to also to share with the creative community. It was both designed and produced by myself in a very short timescale (started beginning of November and ready to launch on 1st December, with the majority of the build out of hours).
The project received fantastic feedback both with our clients and the creative community, winning multiple site of the day awards; usually reserved for pieces that have had multiple people working on them rather than one individual from start to finish. The game received over 11,000 visits during the Christmas period, with high activity on social networks.
I produced all aspects of the game, which even included the process of making a physical Christmas Pudding to be able to get the required shots of all the stages! It was an opportunity to focus on powering animation purely via CSS3 animation with JavaScript animation fall backs to browsers that did not support it. The piece also fully supports high-density (retina) devices throughout by providing an option for those on high-density displays to load the game with 2x imagery.
In 2011 Omobono set out to share the best practice of B2B marketers so that they could learn from their peers. Partnering with The Marketing Society, and ably supported by Circle Research, Omobono researched what B2B marketers really do in digital and what they think works. To complement this research I created the visual infographics to represent the results and also produced a complementary illustration to represent the digital landscape of today.
Produced in illustrator, the aim was to represent the various areas of B2B today; whether that's mobile, search/SEO, social media, video, display advertising, Email marketing etc. The piece has been used for many examples, and also inspired new pieces for our clients.
My personal website is a space in which to experiment. It is a framework to begin working on new ideas and concepts to introduce back into my every day work. Designed to work cross platform - be it desktop, tablet, or mobile - it is both a showcase and a place to work with different types of interactivity.
I created this site from top to bottom to take advantage of various techniques in modern browsers, including the ability to be totally hardware accelerated using native CSS transitions on iOS and Android. As well as desktop browsers that support them such as Chrome and Firefox. This makes the site ideal for viewing on devices such as the iPad, and acts as an example of the fast performance these devices can achieve in-browser, outside of a native app.
It has also been structured to support older browsers by swapping out CSS powered transitions with math and JavaScript to achieve a level of consistency that many opt to forgo. Providing a more unified experience in a scattered browser world is difficult at the best of times!
Important features within the build include: high-density imagery support for retina devices, native CSS transitions with tiered levels of fallback eventually to JavaScript powered animation, hardware acceleration, responsive (with a focus on ensuring an optimum width for desktop displays but with further flexibility when viewed on mobile devices) and web app support (splash screens/touch icons when added as a homescreen application on iOS).
I created all aspects of the website, from initial concept, design, and development; and have powered it using ExpressionEngine.
I was involved in the refresh Omobono company website to bring it more inline with the values and skills of the company with a focus on preparing the site for tablet and desktop. My focus was on the centre-piece, retina imagery, hardware acceleration and tablet specific content. In addition I am also currently responsible for constructing the mobile variant of the piece geared for smaller resolution devices.
I'd been interested in finding a reason to experiment with 3D printing, so I decided to run an internal campaign as an opportunity to give it a try. I turned the people of Omobono into pixel characters and created a competition and the winners received a 3D printed model of their character.
After creating the 3D models to spec, I used the Shapeways service to create full colour sandstone versions of the models.
If you'd like to make an enquiry, please feel free to get in touch, and I will respond as soon as possible.
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