A bit about me

I’ve been an enthusiastic champion of creative for over twenty years bringing ideas and craft to life on the kind of brands your mum will have heard of, while building and leading creative teams of all shapes and sizes. I currently hire, mentor and appraise all of our brilliant art-directors at TMW Unlimited and have been Creative Director across some of our largest award winning accounts.

My career can be pretty much summarised in four parts.

I always wanted a book that felt as if it had been created by 10 different people, so Salford with their 'anti-style' stance was the perfect choice for me and represented the cutting edge of graphic design. Their 'nail the concept first' mantra has remained with me ever since. The 90's was about learning the visual language, developing a finely tuned eye, gaining an intuitive sense of what looked right at a glance and being able to rectify it quickly while making sure it answered the brief in an engaging, lateral way. I was a typography anorak and could spot a bit of dodgy kerning or baggy leading from 50 yards. And the Big Idea above all, remained paramount.

Towards the end of the 90s I made the cross over from print to a pure digital agency and it was around this time I started to see creative in a very different way. Suddenly I was in a collaborative environment working amongst people with massively disparate skills and backgrounds, it felt like being part of a movement. Of course, the stuff we wanted to make often couldn't be done at the time, part of the fun was finding ingenious ways around challenges which in the grand scheme of things would push technology further. It also created a natural transition into art direction and the loose, digital agency structure of the day allowed me to conceptualise and visualise simultaneously while heading up teams of talented creatives, designers, writers, coders and hybrids.

So the noughties were spent stepping away from the mouse towards the marker pen and using my strategic, creative grey-matter more while formally teamed with a writer (Nick Hay, John Vinton and Phil Rhodes latterly) and new opportunities to expand my craft into something feeling more integrated - often large brand campaigns requiring high-end photography, film or animation and the balance of skills required to blend ideation and origination while bringing everyone along on the journey.

Of all the phases in my career, the one I've enjoyed most has been creative leadership - I still love to get my hands dirty on a gnarly pitch-brief or scamping out a quick storyboard - and the great thing with experience is that it comes quicker. Equally I get to work with an even broader bunch of people and having recruited, mentored and worked with some brilliant young talent coming into the industry while helping to drive their vision or shape embryonic thoughts. I call it 'squeezing the pips' - pushing the limits of our boundaries, sometimes fractional changes make all the difference.

And the future? Well, I'm still learning something new everyday, my ambition is to carry on learning and to make a big difference at one or two more agencies over the next decade before I make a leap into the unknown.

Nothing does the work justice quite as much as showing it face to face, so if you fancy finding out more about what I've been up to, just give me a shout >

If you want a specific breakdown of where I've been and who I've worked with, this is a good starting point >

And if you want to know more about the bloke behind the work, it's not you, it's me, me me >