Projects | Work History | Education | Skills | Hobbies & Interests |
Curious, creative and a constant learner is how I would describe myself.
My transition into a career in code is driven by my fascination to understand how tech works, how to extract the most from it and how to make it work better. This journey began with Ataris, Amigas and BBSs, building custom PCs, image and video manipulation using Adobe CS, making websites in Wordpress/HTML/CSS, 3D design and printing, hardware emulation, mobile apps, dabbling with crypto-currency and more. But until Makers, the one constant frustration was not knowing how to change or improve what goes on behind the scenes. Now after 16 intensive weeks of Ruby and JS I now feel I have the tools to match my tech enthusiasm and am looking forward to the next chapter to build upon what I have learnt.
Along with my new coding knowhow you get my 20+ years professional experience as a Creative (Copywriter/Art Director) in the Advertising Industry. My ability to generate ideas and solutions to business problems that make products and services easier to understand for consumers is one of my key strengths. I've made ads of all shapes and sizes, but I've have also created websites, mobile games, apps and digital experiences too.
| Name | Description | Tech/tools |
|---|---|---|
| Achoo! | A Full-Stack web application that uses location-based API pollen data to alert hayfever suffers (via SMS) when the pollen count reaches seriously sneezey levels in their area. Built as part of team project during week 11 & 12 at Makers Academy. | MongoDB (Atlas), Mongoose, ReactJS, Nodejs, Express, Ambee API, SMS, Cypress, JEST, Twilio, HTML, CSS |
| Acebook | A Full-Stack keyboard warrior clone of Facebook. Create and login to an secure account (Bcrypt), make posts and comment on other users post. Built as part of a team project during week 8 & 9 at Makers Academy. | Node.js, MongoDB, Mongoose, Express, Handlebars, Cypress, Jest, Bcrypt, HTML, CSS |
| MakersBnB | A Full-Stack Airbnb clone with user registration, authentication, property listing, property booking and booking confirmation functionality. Built as part of a team project during week 5 at Makers Academy | Ruby, RSpec, Capybara, Sinatra, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS, HTML, CSS |
| Chitter | Week 4 Makers solo weekend project (full stack) - Twitter clone with user registration, authentication, and ability to tweet. (WIP) | Ruby, RSpec, Capybara, Sinatra, PostgreSQL, HTML, CSS |
Drive Dentsu, Horizon FCB, Wunderman Thompson & Geommetry - 2012 to 2015, 2018 to 2020 (5 years - Dubai)
Senior Copywriter & Art Director
- Applied my industry experience to a new culture and market
- Worked with multiple senior creative partners to create, produce and deploy campaigns across multiple regions in the Middle East.
Tygur Creative - 2002 to 2012, 2015 to 2018, 2020 to Present (15 years - London)
Freelance Senior Copywriter & Art Director
- Worked at many of London's most reknowned international advertising and marketing agencies, as well local independants and boutiques.
- Day-to-day would normally involve working alongside a consistent creative partner to produce concepts that would then be presented to wider team for feedback and improvement.
- Would present final concepts to client for approval, then would manage and oversee (designers, illustrators, developers) through to final production stage.
Here's a selection of digital projects that I created during my time in advertising.
| Project name | Description | My involvement |
|---|---|---|
| Toyota 86AR | An Augmented Reality car racing game for iPhone/iPad and Android. Over 1 million downloads. | Concepted ideas, UX, game mechanics, directed design and managed production working with development team. |
| Thrill City | Create your own track and race on the real streets of Google maps - iPhone/iPad and Android. | Concepted ideas, UX, game mechanics, design and managed production working with development team. |
| Passenger 86 | Take your mates on a thrilling ride with this profile face changing racing experience on Facebook. | Concepted ideas, UX, game mechanics, directed design and managed production working with development team. |
| Fungineer my... | A realtime social picture customisation activation. | Concepted ideas, UX, competition mechanics, directed design and managed production working with development team. |
| Toyota Lucky Cards | A user-generated social sharing competition. | Concepted ideas, UX, competition mechanics, directed design and managed production working with development team. |
| Drive Dentsu Website | Complete company website to showcase our work and culture. | Built, designed and produced in Joomla with customised HTML and CSS. |
| XBOX 360 - MyGig | Website to create your own gig lineup poster to win your own 50k music gig. | Concepted ideas, UX, competition mechanics, directed design and managed production working with development team. |
| Bulmers - Summer Experiments | Facebook social activation games to get people in mood for summer. | Concepted ideas, UX, competition mechanics, directed design and managed production working with development team. |
Most of my career in advertising has involved working together alongside another person as a creative duo, so when it came to pair programming on the Makers projects and tasks it felt quite a natural and normal experience. Even during the larger group projects I felt comfortable listening to other people's views and offering my opinion or putting forward ideas of my own on how we should approach a task. We applied agile ways of working in our group projects with morning standups, kanban boards and afternoon retros, again most of which I'm already used to from modern advertising working practises.
One of the main skills you practise in advertising is putting your mind inside the mind of the consumer. This often helps you to break down complex information into simple, but meaningful messages that your audience will understand and resonate with. I also found this particularly true of coding too. I was always thinking about better method and class names that would best reflect and communicate the function of the code. During team projects I would also often comment on key lines in my code to help the other members of the group understand the purpose or flow of information. For me, coding is not just about solving a problems, it's about solving problems in a way that makes it easier for other people to contribute to your code and use the final product.
- Fundamentals of object-oriented languages, Ruby and Javascript.
- Able to write meaningful tests (behaviour vs. state) based on the user requirements.
- Learnt consistent debugging process to resolve issues.
- Designed database schemas with SQL and studied the difference between table-oriented databases vs. document-based (MongoDB).
- Pair programming and group projects using Agile values and principles.
- Used branch/PR/merge git workflow, code reviews and Github Actions for automated testing.
- Built single-page and multi-page web applications fetching and updating remote data using JS/Ruby, with and without React.
- Independent learning and problem-solving throughout
- BA (Hons) Art, Graphic Design & Advertising
- 2.1
Mountain biking - Whatever the weather, you can find me on the trails of Epping Forest most weekends.
Tennis - Getting the perfect Federer single-handed backhand is still the dream.
Kickstarter addict - Backed the first auto-follow drone, a portable tennis ball launcher and some retro-compatible lightguns.
Retro computer/console tinkerer and collector - Fix, mod and enjoy these old machines and their software, staying in-touch with the child-within is important.