Paulpod
Growing up in Britain during the 1980s meant having a home computer from a young age. We had a Dragon 32, the most successful welsh computer to date. I learnt a bit of programming on it, accessed a precursor to the internet, Prestel, and did a fair bit of graphics on the Atari ST we purchased in 1987. That went on to serve me well on a graphic design diploma I studied following school where we were introduced to Apple Macs.
At university in 1992 I studied a branch of design called ‘Electronic Media’, which would get renamed simple ‘New Media’ a few years later. It was a broad design degree, with the technology side geared towards CD-ROM productions. The web emerged towards the end of 1994, so graduating in the following year my first job was designing early websites for BT at their research centre in Martlesham. After a short stint there I went to work for Xerox, designing information spaces for their field engineers.
I finally moved to London and started working for a proper web design shop, Soft Options, in 1997 before freelancing for the ad agencies like BNP DDB. Returning to London in 1999 after a brief spell in Ottawa, Canada I joined Razorfish as a senior designer working on a few big name websites (NatWest bank, Thomas Cook, Millenium Dome) and moved into working on video and interactive TV projects.
The dot com crash reared it’s head and I left at the end of 2000. An extremely brief spell followed at Electronic Ink and then a variety of freelance projects over the next few years led to starting a small agency in 2003 under the name Neuromantics. With some interesting for clients like Vodafone [SVG R&D], Nokia [Insight & Foresight DRM Strategy], BBC [Social TV interface to BBC Redux] and Skype it ticked along on small-to-medium projects. Other things I’ve designed include a newspaper called The London Line (a forerunner of London Lite) various brand guidelines and plenty of marketing driven microsites.
In late 2005 I floated an idea called Tape It Off The Internet or TIOTI for short, which over an extended gestation became a TV social media website. This was a funded start-up that launched in 2007 but after initial growth and a promising start I was struck by serious health issues for much of the following year and TIOTI was sold on to another start-up by December 2008.
At the start of 2009 I’m looking at returning to a more focussed design/strategy role with an eye on trends around RFID, Spimes, Product Design and broad UX issues.