About

Hi! This is a site about my work and a little about me.

It’s easy to be labeled and put in a box as ‘Web-designer/Graphic-designer/Manager’ – I’ve actually worked on a huge range of projects in the past and I’ve listed some specialist skills that I have below.

I’ve studied design formally since age 14 in my GCSE (Design & Technology) and have sketched from long ago. Earliest memory of sketching was when I was about 5 or 6? It was of a cat – but sorry, don’t have the original picture to show.

Thanks and enjoy!
J.

Key achievements:

• 4+ years on large-scale community/social network sites, designing, testing, bugfixing, managing teams, timelines, pushing new product ideas for development;
• 1st Class BA(Hons) in Design & Technology and Visual Arts from England;
• 10+ years experience of web-design: my first ‘website’ was used in touchscreens kiosk at Trafford Centre, Manchester, England;
• Certified ScrumMaster (You’ll know what that is if you’re into agile IT development);
• Confuse people with where I am from;
• Have worked as web-designer/frontend coder for web-communities of 2million+ users;
• Made maths educational software for Nelson Thornes, England with Flash AS2;
• designed packaging (not graphics) in polypropylene, used AutoCad to draw the die, and even designed packaging for Teletubby product! (Yes! Teletubbies);
• Worked alongside sculptor David Nash in Wales near his home:  I had moved about 1 tonne of slates in 1 week to produce a huge spiral;

More technical stuff:

• tools that I use regularly are: Photoshop, Illustrate, Flash, Komodo edit (xHTML, CSS, jQuery), Omnigraffle, Firefox Developer toolbar;
• handcode W3C compliant CSS/xHTML  for all key browsers (and IE6) so if I don’t mention Dreamweaver, doesn’t mean I’m not an expert at it;
• plan, design, code CSS/xHTML including page layout, information architecture, UI (with knowledge of AJAX effects);
• design layout and code for dynamic content;
  apply jQuery effects and have experience with WordPress and Drupal (theming and adding functionality);
• familiar with SVN, bug trackers like Redmine;
• use whiteboards and Version One for SCRUM iteration management;
• experienced with work within a international team of 13 with PHP, C++, Java developers and designers, community managers and researchers;

Work ethics:

• take pride in my work – which means I’ll learn what I need to in order to deliver the best product/design;
• worked in many start-ups, be flexible and willing to put in the effort to help the company/team grow;
• I value good team dynamics and as a manager, it’s important for people to feel comfortable with each other so that we can do the best work possible – super egos are unnecessary and not something I like to work with;
• continual evaluation of how we can work better, how the project can be better so that we can constantly improve;
• be openminded to new ideas and learning;
• honesty and get things done attitude;
• action speaks louder than words, I prefer to let my work speak for itself than just verbally show off about what I can do. So if you’re interested in my work, please do take time in look through the range of and detail of all the projects. Thanks!