About Me

As a teenager I had many interests common to teenagers, a love of computer games and loud music, but I also liked art and drawing, especially 3D graphics I saw on TV show title sequences so at school it was obvious that one of my favourite lessons was technical drawing, a lesson in which I could sit and plan objects out using three elevations and a rudimentary isometric view.

After leaving school in 1987 my dream at the time was to start my own computer games company, but as the internet wasn’t the thing it is today and games companies weren’t so widespread I ended up becoming a business applications programmer, but after a few years I quickly realised that graphic design gave me more creative freedom to play with the skills I’d acquired as a child and an early teenager.

Over the years I climbed various ladders, moving from company to company and expanding my knowledge of various working practices within the industry, more commonly being promoted to assistant or studio manager of the various art departments I came across before I eventually decided that the managerial roles that I was finding myself being placed into were stifling my ability to be creative as a designer, as well as being presented with design briefs that had already been limited by the way in which the concept had been ‘sold’ to the client before it got to a designer.

In 2004 I decided to leave my employer of 10 years to start on my own, with the aim to taking the skills I’d acquired over the years not just to print and paper, but also to cater for web design, video editing and DVD production.

Along with my life partner we formed Broadening Horizons in April 2004 and things were going well until April of 2006 when vandals started a fire round the back that got into the roof and devastated our business and four others, putting our two staff out of work and forcing me and my life partner to relocate the operation back home until our office was rebuilt. Mere days after this upset our third child was born and as a result, in October 2006 we returned in some capacity to Concord House to start again and over the months that followed did our best to make the best of the previously devastating situation.

At the same time as we returned to Concord House we formed Imaginative Ink to take our designs onto further mediums including t-shirts, mousemats, mugs and coasters. As time moved on we also brought digital print in house to cater for short run clients and although this has working well in some cases, it’s also taking over a lot of my time especially and having recently rejoined the gaming scene I’d left in 1987, it is something that we’re looking to reduce again in order to be able to focus our attentions back to why I wanted to start the original company in the first place, along with the newly formed Horizon Studios with games designer Kevin Tapping, developers Zack Braddy and Mike Connell and audio engineer Justin French.

To date 95% of the work I’ve done since I became self employed has been through word of mouth, but unfortunately because of this there have been many occasions where the work that came through the door wasn’t what I really wanted, so this portfolio especially will become a playground for me to throw in various designs and pieces of artwork that are more in tune with the type of things I want to do. Having worked behind the scenes for many other companies to produce award winning work under their name I feel it’s time that I make a known name for myself in areas of graphic, web and games design.