Wow. The last year’s been an amazing journey both as a designer, and in terms of my life. For the last year and a quarter, i’ve been working in-house as Digital designer for an AMAZING charity,
The role has been amazing- where else would i get to learn a bunch of HTML and CSS, a smattering of Jqery, Javascript, and HTML5, make cute animated flash christmas cards, wrangle with a CMS, learn to hand-code cross browser, while keeping my photoshop wizardry SHARP, develop a photo editor’s eye for a good picture, get involved in copywriting, and even touch on user journey/ UX.. work with developers, and then turn round, whip out my camera and go and shoot amazing charity events and the like?
I’ve met some wonderful people, and seriously, for feel-good working, the charity sector can’t be beaten. it’s amazing knwoing the hard work you put in has such a wonderful endpoint- delivering caring, compassionate and much-needed end-of-life care to those who need it.

Alas, all good things come at a price, and the price here was approximately 2hrs EACH WAY spent swearing at cramped trains, inconsiderate commuters, endless endless delays, and never getting home in time to make dinner for my wonderful girlfriend Rosie.

So looking to the Future, what’s next? well, i’ve been lucky enough to get a foot in the door in Brighton with a Top-drawer Email marketing agency,
Slight change of tack for me as well, moving from designer to ‘Creative developer’ working on some blue-chip clients, in a beautifully laid out, airy, open plan office five minutes from my house with what looks to be a bunch of friendly people. i start in just over a month’s time.

This isn’t the end of my work with charities though.. i figure i should give some of this new-found free time to good causes. Watch this space for more news.
I’ll also be devoting some more time to my much-missed hobbies of photography, making some short videos, and replacing the disgracefully rusty strings on my les paul with some new ones (sorry neighbours!)

I’m ALSO going to fit in a trip to corfu in between jobs. i hit the dreaded 30 in just under a month, i intend to do it somewhere sunny with cheap booze.
i’m quite possibly (according to sources) getting a waterproof camera for my birthday so we shall see where that takes me.. underwater 1080p video is the likely answer.

Sampled is part brainchild of Tarl Jamieson- more commonly known as Mo Fingaz- one of london’s top hip-hop dj’s he’s behind the Main Squeeze blog and hip-hop nights, and also a very good designer in his own right. Another of my old colleagues from Fenchurch, Tarl turned to me to turn his design work into working, flowing code.
the result of the collaboration is here:
Sampled UK

Hand-coded in html/css with a little javascript and jqery, a PHP contact form, and some nice jqery plugins for the gallery side of things.
Working with Tarl was fun, we already had a good working rapport, and there’s more projects in the pipeline!

An old colleague of mine from Fenchurch clothing, Shara approached me to make her Fashion design website. we’d worked together before on a video, she wanted the website to echo this, futuristic images of space, fractals, digital glitching etc.

the Website can be found here: http://www.sharahayz.comHand-coded in html/css with a smattering of javascript & jqery for good measure.

Shara’s always good to work with, and i’m glad to see she’s getting a lot of recognition- her work recently featured in the new Hot Chip video, and she’s been all over the blogosphere after her work appeared at brighton fashion week.

Shara had this to say about working with me:

“Always a pleasure to work with Pete !! While at Fenchurch, when our work crossed over, Pete was super efficient/ helpful/ highly creative as well as having great technical knowledge, Along side his down to earth and friendly personality. This led me to commission him to work on my own design work where he created a Video and my Website, following my instructions down to a ‘T’ with great communication, he was able to produce my vision to a very high standard.” June 30, 2012

As the saying goes, ‘All work & no play makes jack a dull boy.’
At the tender age (pfft) of 29andabit years, i find myself in the position of, college and brief redundancy aside, having worked solidly for the last 14 years. 14 freaking years! that’s half of my life. and excluding as i do the odd few days spent home in cornwall, and one all-too-brief 2 day trip to Gothenburg in Sweden whenj my other half visited on business, i have Never had a holiday. not once.
let me reiterate. I HAVE NEVER HAD A HOLIDAY.
This is one of those admissions that makes people look at you strangely. try telling your bank manager, or a bouncer you don’t have a passport. The first question is why not? well, up till this point, the answer has been the same as if you ask me why i don’t posess, for example, a fishing license. i don’t travel.
So this weekend, me and my long-suffering girlfriend are going here: http://www.goldcity.com.tr/ Alanya in Turkey. she’s excited about the break, the free bar, and the spa, and not being in England for a bit. I’m excited about wandering round loads of old ruins and caves with a camera, being abroad, (and the free bar)
expect smugly presented glossy video footage of old stuff and me looking relaxed. actually, i’ll be behind the camera, so make that my girlfriend looking relaxed.

So i recently got approached by Murdock London, a barbers and gentleman’s grooming company with three barbershops across london, to makeover their individual store pages. the brief was simple, capture the Murdock look and feel, make the pages more appealing while retaining the information, and restructure the information hierarchy to show important info above the ‘fold’
the template was to be designed with a view to being reusable across the three stores, and for the future.
taking inspiration from their clean colour scheme and victorian style, (influences taken from classic penguin books can be clearly seen) i used a simple floral motif and a selection of the company colours, and added a little flair
hasn’t been developed by me, so in places it’s not ENTIRELY to my spec, but close enough!
link

Good lord. has it REALLY been that long? me at sixteen and three quarters, 13 years ago. standing in front of my second year final project for my graphic design diploma at cornwall college- a piece entitled ‘museum of failures in the 21st century’ the mural behind was painted/airbrushed, the pile of crap on the desk is actually a faithfully recreated scene from a dump, and the old broken looking tv is playing a video installation rolling through such cheery topics as famine, disease, war, racism, etc.. (i was a cheery youth!)
thirteen years and i’m still happy to say i’m a graphic designer and proud of it.
i no longer have so much acne, or a head shaped like an acorn though. and i’m DEFINITELY not that thin.

a while back, i posted expressing my disdain for the current incarnation of my website. i guess like all designers, i get bored of one style easily, and need change. well, it’s coming. pending about ten lines of code, a thanks page, and a new favicon, whcih should be accomplished tonight, everything is ready to rock and roll. expect a new site soon… VERY soon.
honourable mentions have to go to the esteemed Niall Doherty for his excellent Coda-Slider plugin, a nice jqery slider which has enabled my design work, to the lovely Galleria plugin which has showcased my photo blogs, and to PrettyPhoto which has helped me no end, and my new favourite, absolute dreamweaver killer, notepad++ the single most useful, FREE coding app ever made.

updates in te next 24 hours or i’ll eat my hat.

Here’s a quick link to a recent project of mine, Berti Investments. Berti are a green investment company who specialise in UK based green business ventures. i was approached to design the site for them. after some initial teething troubles, and a first version being quickly replaced with a second version, here’s the final result
main site is hand-coded html/css, with a couple of rss feeds, and a custom wordpress CMS for the news and portfolio pages.

this is one seriously weird little event. probably the only place in the modern world you’ll see contextually acceptible cross-burning and people throwing fireworks at the pope.

Made this for Marie Curie on one of their recent walk ten events in eastbourne. shot on a Nikon d5100, various lenses, edited and graded in after effects cs4. worthwhile cause. http://www.mariecurie.org.uk/walkten for details