Manifesto - Design

My design philosophy is simple, achieve the best balance between form and function. I believe that they are equally important, even though this can sometimes be a precarious challenge. When tackling a brief, quite often there is more than one way to go about it. Inevitably, my role as a designer is to make an informed decision on which way to take, with both the use and user always in mind, and then execute it to not only to the highest professional standard, but to my own personal satisfaction and practicioner's ego.

I am a designer for both print and web. I understand both the constraints and opportunities of these two very different outputs.

Although I began as a traditional illustrator drawing totally by hand on paper with pencil, ink and paint, I finally purchased a Mac G3 in 1997 to enter the world of PrePress. I discovered Photoshop and layout programs which ultimately replaced the pasting up of bromides.

Soon afterwards, through natural evolution, I then embraced multimedia and the Internet. I studied web developing and made my first tentative steps into authoring with the original Director.

So technology has made designing for me much more efficient, immediate and accurate. However, I believe that my background as a traditional artist gives me an edge. While ultimately it's not about the tool you use but rather the idea behind it, I suspect that you still must be able to draw first. It seems to give you a greater sensitivity, giving you much more scope and freedom.

I use Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, InDesign and Xpress everyday for my print product. For the web I use Dreamweaver and Firework to author websites, along with hard-fought smarts hand-coding html and CSS. I also have had experience creating artwork in Flash for animations, and for training CDRoms and intranet vehicles, and actually like to use it as a vector drawing tool. Thank God for the Wacom graphics tablet!

I also continue working with my traditional skills, particularly in mixed media, to combine with the digital medium. At times this can give me a unique style and organic quality - maybe something different in this world of digital design.