About

Work

I’m currently a front-end developer working on the gov.uk website. Previously I’ve been a web designer, user interface designer and eLearning multimedia developer. I’ve been doing this since 1993 and have been involved in over 100 digital projects which is pretty remarkable when you think about it.

You can find out more about my career history, or view my work in the portfolio.

Play

I’m a creative person with myriad outlets including making dioramas, modding old video-games, writing rubbish stories and trying to make art. I love classical art and architecture, especially historic buildings: everything from medieval castles to Victorian terraced houses to ancient Egyptian tombs.

I enjoy spending time in art galleries, watching films and exploring other worlds in video-games. I used to be a voracious reader, mainly sci-fi and weird fantasy but my capacity for those overlong doorstoppers is now almost non-existent (I blame Covid and parenting). I only read short books these days, which is rather refreshing.

I used to cycle a lot and still try to get out on the bike when I can, but these days most of my spare time is spent with my young son: I came late to parenthood and it’s proving to be a marvellous adventure.

Website

This website was relaunched in 2024 after several years offline. I now use it to record the output of my career, a kind of digital archive. Currently the portfolio only displays work from the last decade or so, but eventually I’ll include everything I’ve ever worked on…

I think this is the twelfth version of my personal site since I started building them more than twenty years ago. A dozen re-designs, maybe one every couple of years. That’s kind of nuts, but reflects my creative energies and the changing fashions of the web. The last few versions ran on Craft CMS but that became much too heavy to maintain. I now use the brilliant Zola static site generator.

I’ve continued to use a simple design so that the interface gets out of the way. The icons are by Tabler Icons and text is set in IBM Plex Sans.

Until recently, my domains were registered with Google and my sites were on Netlify. But when Google sold their domain business to Squarespace in 2023, I moved all my domains to Cloudflare and the hosting to Cloudflare Pages. This is the neatest setup I could find, which allows me to keep domain registration and hosting with the same provider and deploy simple static sites with the minimum of fuss.

Updated May 2024