I am a creative director / executive producer who loves innovation and technology. My passion and professional trade is strategically conceptualizing, creating and producing digital and integrated solutions for brands, agencies and campaigns.
Keep on prototyping, keep on dreaming, keep on designing, building, innovating! Welcome failure, learn from it.
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Career Achievements:
Webby Awards = 2x Winner + 1x Finalist Career Achievements:
Cannes Festival of Creativity = Gold Lion · Health & Wellness + Bronze Lion · Creative Strategy + 17x Shortlists
Clios = 2x Gold
The One Show = 3x Gold 2x Silver 1x Bronze Pencils + 4 Merits
D&AD = 2x Gold winners
FWA = SOTD x4
Canadian Marketing Awards = Best of Show + 10x Golds + 3x Silvers + 2x Bronze
Media Innovation Awards = Best of Show + 4x Gold
Atomic Awards = Best of Show/Grand Prix + 4x Gold + 2x Silver
Marketing Magazine Awards = 2x Gold
CASSIES = 1x Gold
Exhibitor Magazine Award = Gold
ADCC Directions = Scarlet Letter (Saatchi) + 6x Silver + 4x Merits
W3 Awards = Best of Show + 2x Gold
Shopper Innovation Awards = 3x Silver
FITC awards winner (audio)
Awwwards - Merit
Yell Awards (London UK) = Winner (E-commerce)
Strategy Magazine B!G Award (bronze)
Applied Arts = x9 Awards
Communication Arts = x6 Awards
Equal parts Creative, Strategist and Producer, I've had the pleasure of working with amazing artists, advertising agencies and also companies/brands directly.
"Skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been."
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
- Walter and Wayne Gretzky
I enjoy disruptive thinking. A way of thinking that produces an unconventional strategy that causes innovation and leaves competitors scrambling to catch up. A way of thinking that turns consumer expectations upside down and takes an industry into its next generation.
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How does one develop disruptive thinking? Good question, the answer is to innovate and challenge the status quo. Challenge the norm. Challenge the conventional. Get uncomfortable with normal. Embrace prototyping. Learn from each failure. Take (calculated) risks. Take (educated) guesses. Position for the future to achieve a competitive edge. Be bold yet kind and humble. When you win say nothing and when you loose say less.
"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
- Walter and Wayne Gretzky
I enjoy disruptive thinking. A way of thinking that produces an unconventional strategy that causes innovation and leaves competitors scrambling to catch up. A way of thinking that turns consumer expectations upside down and takes an industry into its next generation.
___
How does one develop disruptive thinking? Good question, the answer is to innovate and challenge the status quo. Challenge the norm. Challenge the conventional. Get uncomfortable with normal. Embrace prototyping. Learn from each failure. Take (calculated) risks. Take (educated) guesses. Position for the future to achieve a competitive edge. Be bold yet kind and humble. When you win say nothing and when you loose say less.
History
United Kingdom
I began my career as an artist, musician and tech/game enthusiast and today I still do that so chat to me about flash, graphics, games, sprites, viewports and audio.
As a kid I remember Space invaders v.1 in the arcade cabinet and the Atari. My brother and I built our first computer games using BASIC on the Sinclair zx80 & zx81 (a.k.a. Timex Sinclair 1000). I loved making and playing games. From Sinclair's zx80 and zx81 my brother and I progressed to BBC 16k, Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Amiga 600, Spectrum 48 & 128 and beyond.
I loved art and design at school and went on to study audio sequencing, synthesis and music technology at college using Apple II and early MIDI synths. During this time, circa windows95, the web and as we know it was quite boring, lame and fairly atrocious to look at aesthetically. I wanted to change the GUI and I saw a potential with this digital canvas.
By chance, I came across a demo CD of "FutureSplash 2" (by Futurewave) and then of course "Flash 3" (by Macromedia) and I was blown away!!!! Here was a creative vector animation tool that could (and would) change the web forever. I quickly transitioned to building and designing websites, GUIs and animations.
By the release of Flash 4, I was running a web division at a cool agency and we were adding flash animations, audio targets and motion, even early web video. Circa 1999, the web was a vibrant, exciting place full of potential, we knew the web was the future and important but nobody knew back then just how integral the web would become in our everyday lives today.
Canada
From building websites to building a community.
I left England in 2001 with dreams of mobile media and I headed to North America to become part of an exciting, vibrant and creative flash design community. Inspired by the late, great Hillman Curtis who was (and still is) an inspirational and creative force in my life.
I landed in Toronto Canada and the first fellow flash enthusiast I met was Shawn Pucknell. Shawn ran a monthly flash user group event called FlashinTO. I joined and became Executive Director of FlashinTO, and we quickly grew the FlashinTO group to become the world’s largest Adobe Flash user group (3,000+ developers and artists).
FlashinTO gave birth to an inaugural industry event "FlashintheCan" which evolved into today's global event "FITC". FITC originated in Toronto and is now a global creative technology design event with a large community of talented people worldwide, a real artistic movement for modern times. I'm eternally grateful for the Flash community as a whole, Gmunk, Joshua Davis, Erik Natzke, Colin Moock, Jared Tarbell, Craig Swann, Brendan Dawes, Yugo Nakamura, Grant Skinner and many more, thank you for sharing and inspiring all of us.
Flash allowed a new way of thinking about thrilling, immersive, creative websites and mobile experiences, games, interactive storytelling capabilities. You may not know Flash was also used to build a multitude of groundbreaking web games and other online solutions such as Gmail and YouTube, (both these platforms were built using Flash).
Flash is sadly now retired, mostly thanks to Apple and Steve Jobs and his agenda to remove Flash his main competitor. However, the vibrant community continues to create, share and build using new languages and exciting platforms such as js, three.js Unity, Unreal, ARkit, ARCore, Spark, Processing, Open Frameworks, Cinder, Touch Designer, CSS, WebGL, WebAR, Machine Learning, TensorFlow and a multitude of new frameworks, authoring tools and languages. We now live in exciting times of Virtual, Augmented, Spatial and Mixed Reality, while Social Media, Mobile Apps, A.I., IoT, Robotics and creative tech culture is evolving more everyday.
I look forward to creating more exciting content and solutions across all platforms.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading.
-s1m0n
United Kingdom
I began my career as an artist, musician and tech/game enthusiast and today I still do that so chat to me about flash, graphics, games, sprites, viewports and audio.
As a kid I remember Space invaders v.1 in the arcade cabinet and the Atari. My brother and I built our first computer games using BASIC on the Sinclair zx80 & zx81 (a.k.a. Timex Sinclair 1000). I loved making and playing games. From Sinclair's zx80 and zx81 my brother and I progressed to BBC 16k, Dragon 32, Commodore 64, Amiga 600, Spectrum 48 & 128 and beyond.
I loved art and design at school and went on to study audio sequencing, synthesis and music technology at college using Apple II and early MIDI synths. During this time, circa windows95, the web and as we know it was quite boring, lame and fairly atrocious to look at aesthetically. I wanted to change the GUI and I saw a potential with this digital canvas.
By chance, I came across a demo CD of "FutureSplash 2" (by Futurewave) and then of course "Flash 3" (by Macromedia) and I was blown away!!!! Here was a creative vector animation tool that could (and would) change the web forever. I quickly transitioned to building and designing websites, GUIs and animations.
By the release of Flash 4, I was running a web division at a cool agency and we were adding flash animations, audio targets and motion, even early web video. Circa 1999, the web was a vibrant, exciting place full of potential, we knew the web was the future and important but nobody knew back then just how integral the web would become in our everyday lives today.
Canada
From building websites to building a community.
I left England in 2001 with dreams of mobile media and I headed to North America to become part of an exciting, vibrant and creative flash design community. Inspired by the late, great Hillman Curtis who was (and still is) an inspirational and creative force in my life.
I landed in Toronto Canada and the first fellow flash enthusiast I met was Shawn Pucknell. Shawn ran a monthly flash user group event called FlashinTO. I joined and became Executive Director of FlashinTO, and we quickly grew the FlashinTO group to become the world’s largest Adobe Flash user group (3,000+ developers and artists).
FlashinTO gave birth to an inaugural industry event "FlashintheCan" which evolved into today's global event "FITC". FITC originated in Toronto and is now a global creative technology design event with a large community of talented people worldwide, a real artistic movement for modern times. I'm eternally grateful for the Flash community as a whole, Gmunk, Joshua Davis, Erik Natzke, Colin Moock, Jared Tarbell, Craig Swann, Brendan Dawes, Yugo Nakamura, Grant Skinner and many more, thank you for sharing and inspiring all of us.
Flash allowed a new way of thinking about thrilling, immersive, creative websites and mobile experiences, games, interactive storytelling capabilities. You may not know Flash was also used to build a multitude of groundbreaking web games and other online solutions such as Gmail and YouTube, (both these platforms were built using Flash).
Flash is sadly now retired, mostly thanks to Apple and Steve Jobs and his agenda to remove Flash his main competitor. However, the vibrant community continues to create, share and build using new languages and exciting platforms such as js, three.js Unity, Unreal, ARkit, ARCore, Spark, Processing, Open Frameworks, Cinder, Touch Designer, CSS, WebGL, WebAR, Machine Learning, TensorFlow and a multitude of new frameworks, authoring tools and languages. We now live in exciting times of Virtual, Augmented, Spatial and Mixed Reality, while Social Media, Mobile Apps, A.I., IoT, Robotics and creative tech culture is evolving more everyday.
I look forward to creating more exciting content and solutions across all platforms.
If you made it this far, thank you for reading.
-s1m0n
