I began my Advertising/Design industry career as a voucher clerk, moving into the Traffic and then Production Departments. I became conversant with pre and post- press technology and artwork production methods during this time as well as being expected to deliver high speed delivery turn-arounds. At Riley Advertising London, I  served as a full Board Director for eight years, with responsibility for the Production Department. This responsibility included print buying, a finished artwork and  typography studio and an in-house typesetting function with proof-reading.

This Department consisted of 32 personnel, some of whom were employed on a night-shift  during Riley’s heyday. During our introduction of in-house typesetting, the print industry was experiencing a technological revolution which had culminated in a union war. The advertising agency/studio world had become embroiled in this mess, consequently I learned a great deal about diplomacy during this time. It became  necessary for me to liase with the NGA, Slade and SOGAT, under the direction of Lionel Savery of the IPA.

The in-house facility created new large profit streams and proved to be a strong USP, these were changing times however.

The arrival of Desktop computers into our environment in the late 1980s, particularly Apple’s Macintosh, coincided with the recession which led to many agencies folding and most of the survivors to shed staff with redundancies. I suffered this fate when Rileys decided to axe most of the department and close down the in-house facility.

I had just began a feasibility study into the new technology from Apple as the existing solutions had become far to costly to be profitable in the developing environment which was being created alongside the improved technology.

This encouraged me to jump ship from the management side of the business and become hands-on, it was obvious that the old relationships were changing fast!. Consequently from 1993 to the present, I have been working as a digital creative artwork artist, primarily using Adobe Creative Suite, Quark Xpress, Freehand and where requested,  MS Office. I developed advanced skills in the traditional page-make-up field and progressed to high-end retouching and image-manipulation.

My first project as a freelancer was on a short term contract as a Desk Top Publishing and Print consultant to UK Government  Home Office, based in the Research and Planning Unit at Queen Anne’s Gate in South West One. The tenure of the contract initially was to be two months, however as things turned out, it was renewed twice, up to a date where due to Home Office policy the term could not be further extended as it had exceeded nine months, at this point, the position had to be filled by an existing employee of the Home Office, failing that a civil servant from another Government Department.

My role at Queen Anne’s Gate had consisted of setting up a small Macintosh based department, including systems management and appraisal whilst liaising with the Home Office Computer Support Unit and training staff. This meant that from brand new boxed equipment I connected, tested and tuned up the Mac system, handled and took responsibility for installing registering and testing all of the software. Having set the system up, my brief was completely hands-on, Designing and laying out and producing all publications which were generated by The Home Office Research team.

In this role I also trained and supervised members of the Team and inducted them into using  Mac Desktop Computers and software.

Additionally I created specialised graphs for use as overhead slides or for reproduction in the national press (usually the Guardian). This role meant that I had sole responsibility for the finished publications, from input through to film output and then to press. 

At Agenda I designed and created the digital artwork for the majority of the display panels for an exhibition entitled ‘The Science of Sport’ which opened at The Science Museum, South Kensington, showing for 18 months. The exhibition then visited other national museum locations on a tour of the British Isles.

I spent 11 months working with Addison International mainly on company report and accounts for major blue chip multi-nationals, including BBC, Smith Kline Beecham, Novacom and Northern Water. The specialist area in which this WPP Company works is corporate brochures and report and accounts so the work is heavily typesetting oriented with Illustrator being used for detailed and complex charts and graphs.

After moving on from Addison, I worked with Generator (the in-house production company of the Pauffley Group) where I set up, typeset, produced the graphs and completed artwork to final film for the Annual Report & Accounts and Consolidated Results documents for Electrolux International’s financial year. The entire project was produced on an Apple Macintosh computer that we shipped to Sweden, using third party hi-resolution images, sourced locally. This necessitated working in Stockholm and liaising with the Swedish printer and repro house. The books were produced in American English, Swedish and French versions to an extremely demanding deadline.

I worked with Design Alliance, a packaging specialist on packaging design and production on projects on behalf of Del Monte and Remington International.

I have spent some time working at the Proctor & Gamble Headquarters for Conran Design, who have an in-plant Design Facility there. The work consisted of a mix of display work, point of sale design and production. Whilst working with Conran I designed and produced Equity Guide manuals for Boss Men’s’ Products and Giorgio Beverly Hills. I have since worked with Interbrand and the Y&R Group in similar roles.

More recently I have worked with, AGA, Altadicta, Blue Goose, Brand Union (formerly Enterprise IG) Carré Noir, Chatland Sayer, Creative Marketing Direct, Deep, FM Design, Fox Kamolaski, Girl Guiding UK, Hodes MacMillan Davis, Imagination, The Loewy Group, MGA Design, Methodist Church, RMG-Connect (JWT) Stanford Burgess, and Two by Two.

The Uffindell West work included working for 3 months solely on a major re-branding exercise for the British Standards Institute (BSI). This entailed the creation of master logotypes for all of their various national and international divisions. Working solo, I produced not only the logo artworks in every format and permutation (Mac and PC) but also the guideline documents, print and interactive (PDF) for CD and use on the BSI web- site.

Whilst with Creative Marketing Direct I was engaged in a project to produce various, catalogues, user guides and price guides for Osma Wavin, a multi-national producer of products for the drainage, plumbing and heating industries encompassing sectors of the market from domestic DIY through to civil engineering. Each book covers all of the products in their relevant range.

With rmg-connect (a JWT affiliate specialising in direct marketing) I worked on the launch of new Daimler Chrysler car; the ‘Grand Sports Tourer’ or GST (which became the R Series). This included extensive high-resolution retouching. I also worked on projects for Motorola, HSBC, Spirit, Avis and Shell.

For Guiding UK, the work included designing and laying out 2 issues of Guiding Magazine, to print-ready stage, in addition to general page layout and artwork.

The Brand Union work involved working on part of their own relaunch identity. This consisted mainly of Indesign and Illustrator work and included some of their new stationery.

At Deep, I artworked all of the various financial application forms as part of the rebranding carried out on behalf of their client Brewin Dolphin.

I am currently retained as a designer with The Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) producing cover designs and artwork for various ‘Toolkits’ which they market to industry human resource departments, including many advertising agencies and recruitment advertisers.

I am also a member of the Design Team at the London Borough of Hackney working on a permanent basis as Designer/Creative Artworker designing and art-working some of the wide variety of print and information materials that is generated on behalf of their residents. One of my duties is to work on Hackney Today, a fortnightly newspaper published the Council. I prepare all of the imagery for this thirty two page CMYK newsprint publication.

I retouch, re-size, colour balance and produce clipping paths where required on every image and assign the correct specs for the printer; Mirror Newspapers. This takes place on the last 2 days of production.

I produce repro-ready high resolution PDFs of the publication which are uploaded to the Mirror online imposition site on Friday night. The publication is printed and finished over the weekend and distributed free to every Hackney resident on the following Monday, all 108,000 of them.

The following pages have been taken from the downloadable PDF detailing some examples of my past work:, in order to view these at true resolution it is advised that the PDF be downloaded by clicking on the miniature cover sheet at the top of the Home Page page.