About The Author
Hello! My name is Paul, and I’m a Graphic Designer specialising in visual interface design, information architecture and HTML programming. In addition to my love of all things design, I have a growing passion for travel, and an interest in British and American politics.
I grew up in the South East of England, and laterly the Midlands, before studying Graphic Design at Cumbria Institute of the Arts between 1999-2002. In 2004 I joined Orange Vision, a small web marketing agency in Lichfield, where I advocated the companies adoption of web standards and accessible design practices.
2006 saw me move to the United States to take on the Lead Designer role at Ning, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California. My design direction and standards guidance for it’s social web applications, helped the company become host to the largest number of social networks on the Internet.
As Baz Luhrmann sang, you should live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft, so in 2008 I returned to the UK and embarked on my most ambitious project yet, taking the plunge into the world of freelancing, working with clients such as nGenera Corporation, Apture, Gumtree and the Mozilla Add-ons team.
In June 2009, I joined the Brighton based web agency Clearleft as a Visual Designer.
Photo by Jeremy Keith
About This Website
This site is built using a variety of third-party tools and services.
It was produced using an Apple MacBook Pro, with Fireworks used to realise early design concepts and ideas, before then being marked up as HTML in Dreamweaver. I use and recommend (mt) Media Temple for web hosting.
Entries, articles and supporting pages for this site are published using the Movable Type 4 publishing platform, alongside a number of supporting plugins:
- Markdown and SmartyPants by John Gruber
- FlickrPhotos by Marc Carey
- Fire Eagle Plugin by Ben Trott
- Action Streams by Mark Paschal
- Gravatar by Automattic
- MT-Regex by Brad Choate
I have also referenced the following articles:
- Compose to a Vertical Rhythm and Web Typography by Richard Rutter
- Font Stacks by Unit Interactive
- Awesompersands by Patrick Haney
- Ghost in the Machine Tags by Jeremy Keith
I always try to adhere to Web Standards and best practices. As such, HTML markup should validate as XHTML 1.1, visual design is provided using valid CSS, and the syndicated feed is valid RSS. Behaviour and effects are programmed using the JQuery JavaScript framework, and an extra layer of semanticism is available thanks to Microformats.
Stats are tracked with Mint.