early career
Founder · Studio Lead · Internet Division Head
overview
Before moving into contract freelancing, I built a commercial career that spanned three distinct roles — each one formative in a different way. Together they gave me grounding in business operations, print production, typography and the earliest commercial applications of the web.
limited company — london
Founded and ran a limited company in London with a team of six. Responsibilities spanned business development, client management, production oversight and studio delivery. Running a small company is a crash course in every discipline simultaneously — sales, operations, people management, cashflow and creative quality all compete for the same bandwidth.
This was the period when the web was transitioning from a curiosity to a commercial channel, and the company evolved with it.
head of studio — newspaper dtp
Headed the production studio for a small newspaper DTP company. Responsible for the end-to-end production of print publications — from layout and typography through to pre-press output.
This role built a deep understanding of visual hierarchy, layout discipline and the constraints of production at speed — skills that directly inform my eye for UI/UX detail today. My MA in Graphic Design was earned during this period.
internet division — printing company, south africa
Led the Internet division of a printing company in South Africa, building out their digital offering in the early commercial web era. This was genuine frontier territory — the tools, standards and infrastructure were rudimentary, and most of what was needed had to be figured out from first principles.
It was here that I developed the habit of enjoying problems that can't be solved with a Google search.
the thread through all three
Print, publishing and early web share a set of disciplines that transfer directly into modern frontend engineering: typography, visual hierarchy, production at deadline, and communicating clearly with clients about technical constraints. That background is why I have always been as comfortable in design conversations as in engineering ones.