and his Coffee-Break Brain-Dump

This website is a sort of catchall for lots of things that I do. The work half of me is  designer and marketer. I have designed high profile things like parts of the Egg website, much of Bank of Scotland, mountaineering clothing, a travel clothing range, award winning advertising for Daewoo, Ricoh Cameras and Mamiya. I have been marketing manager of companies such as Rohan, Karrimor and Regatta. I was drawn towards the creative aspects of marketing and eventually left marketing management and set out on a career as a copywriter where I freelanced articles in specialist publications, national papers and also magazines such as Outdoors Illustrated and Punch.  I became a self-taught graphic designer and honed the skills eventually winning a clutch of awards for design and even publishing books on the subject. I later took post graduate qualifications in multimedia ...

While I'm changing everything about this website, I thought a bit of context to the montain biking obsession I currently have. In June 2009 Mountain Mayhem will be held at Eastnor Park in Worcestershire. Mountain Mayhem is a 24 hour endurance mountain bike race which involves teams of four people (you do get soloists as well) riding a 8 to 10 mile course non-stop for 24 hours. The team who does the most laps, wins. Last year, some friends did the race and so I went along to put up tents, clean bikes, make tea and get in the way. I became very interested in getting involved this year and so four of us with a combined age of neolithic artifacts are entering the race. We are called Hanley WYLD - we live in a village called Hanley Swan and our surnames (Adrian ...

I hate bad design. I don't mean bad colours (although that isn't pleasant  I see that as styling as distinct from design). Most of all I hate convoluted and complicated things that are passed off as user-centred. Since I was driving user-centric design ten years ago when the rest of the world was arguing whether hyperlinks should be blue or just underlined, I feel strongly about design and partially responsible for the the way design has largely prevailed in the face of technical developers and their database inhibited twaddle. But every now and then, like this month while experimenting with some news style  themes for a project, I came across Arthemia. There is a lovely free version which I thought I would try, not that I object to premium themes, we all have to make a living and theme designers should be ...