About me

I’m not a typical designer, developer or editor, but rather, someone who plans and implements projects from beginning to end. Interdisciplinary working at the interface of design, technology and words – for more than 25 years.

A one-person team with agency thinking – without the agency overheads. Digital solutions that don’t simply just work, but are well thought out – in terms of design, technology and content.

My career is as multitracked as Sheffield station and as unusual as a purple cow dancing in its foyer.

How come? I work in interdisciplinary manner at the interface of design, technology and words.

Whereby an HR person reading this would suffer a heart attack.

Because today, everyone has a specialism and sticks to it. But when I was young, ‘doing stuff on computers’ WAS a specialism.

And because I’ve been self-employed since the Cretaceous period, I’ve been free to develop how I thought best for me and my customers.

For me, interdisciplinary working isn’t a hollow assertion, but lived reality.

How did all this happen?

Even as a child, I was fascinated with words, language and pictures, how these worked and the interplay between them.

So it’s no wonder I ended up working with all these – in different combinations that have varied over the years.

Initially just print. And later, when self-employed, mainly in the music industry.

As I’m one of the last people who see a text before a project gets sent to the printers, I’d have a bad conscience if it got permanently committed to paper containing dodgy spelling and grammar and the like.

In 1999, I created my first website for a customer and suddenly, through word of mouth, I had a portfolio of the things, some of which I looked after for years.

Here too, I couldn’t bring myself to simply press the publish button without carefully examining the texts. Because who knows what could be lurking there.

And although at that time I still lived in the UK, I was already working with German record companies.

“You’re fluent in German. Could you translate our sales texts? And I know a magazine that needs English translations…”

Another service in my burgeoning bag of tricks.

At the same time, I occasionally wrote articles for a music magazine.

And I assumed this perfect professional life would carry on forever. (Yeah, that was naive of me.)

Because during this time, as a result of filesharing and MP3 players, the sales of records and CDs were shrinking so much it was barely possible for musicians to make a living from their music – if at all.

As if that wasn’t enough, my website customers gradually drifted off to what were then the new blogging and social media platforms.

Shit.

Change of direction needed.

Without thinking too much of it, I applied at a translation agency that was looking for external German–English translators.

And things took off immediately.

“Bonkers how much money these German medium-sized family businesses are prepared to lay out for translations of their operating manuals and marketing materials!”

I was able to expand the translations and through the 2010s mainly lived from those.

With my wallet expanding as a result, and still as an EU citizen (*grrrrr*), I even managed to emigrate to Germany.

Although my life as a translator was now somewhat monotonous (“… then tighten the four screws …”), I assumed this life would carry on forever. (Yeah, again, that was naive of me.)

But it did carry on for a while – until the first half-usable machine translations appeared.

“Ah, businesses will prefer to spend money on quality than use barely acceptable stuff for nowt.”

No, they wouldn’t.

Up until then – and like a lot of self-employed people and small businesses – I’d designed, created and written websites without the right strategy. (Even this order is suboptimal!)

But everything changed in 2019, when I landed on a copywriter’s website.

“What?! You find out what your target audience is searching for online, and write about that?! And then your ideal customers find you, just like that?!”

That was a massive revelation.

With this new knowledge I was able to suck up the last crumbs of the dying translation agency. At least that’s something.

With 25 keywords on page 1 of Google, the enquiries and orders were regularly trundling in. Until, in November 2022, they suddenly stopped.

“Ah, businesses won’t just stick their texts in this new ChatAI-thingummy and …”

Yeah, they will.

Grrr …

After a period of puzzling, tinkering, fiddling about, metaphorically screaming and earning like a seamstress working under contract in the fast fashion industry, it’s now clearer to me:

Make a virtue of all this.