I work for a leading national magazine publisher, designing editorial pages for a monthly title. I have been a graphic designer since September 2000, and joined my current company in March 2008.
I am not a university graduate - I left full time education at 16 and spent a few years working in various low skilled jobs, then applied for a junior designer position at a printing company in my home town. There were no other ‘creatives’ at this company; I replaced their sole designer who left to have a baby. With plenty of trial and error, the infinite resources of internet at my fingertips, and the help of some very patient designer friends, I quickly got to grips with Adobe PageMaker and Photoshop and learned the basic skills of graphic design for print. I don’t feel that missing out on a university education has hindered my career; instead I have neatly sidestepped many of the bad habits, snobbery, and preconceived ideas about the design industry which afflict so many newly-graduated degree students. Plus, I also avoided a costly student loan.
I grew up in Solihull in the West Midlands, and moved to Brighton in August 2004. My design career wasn’t the reason I relocated to the south coast, but Brighton has provided me with opportunities to mix with other creative and technical minded people that I don’t believe I would have ever had in the Midlands. I consider myself lucky to have fallen in with a lovely crowd of people who inspire me every day, and through their own achievements they encourage me to keep striving for success of my own.
I fall to the left on the political compass, and if asked I would say that my opinions are typically secular humanist - although it wasn’t until aged 24 that I learned that there is well-established system of beliefs which corresponds with much of what I have thought and felt since I started to form my own opinions about the world. I still hesitate to commit to the humanist ‘label’ as I reserve the right to have opinions which differ from other people’s, humanist or otherwise (…which in itself is encouraged in humanism, so maybe I’m stuck with this label whether I like it or not!).
Much of my free time is spent developing my online social network, keeping up to date with the latest scientific and technologic progress, studying in depth the various facets of personal and social psychology, amusing myself with the latest internet memes, and reading books with dystopian, cyber-punk and hard SF themes.