About me…

I started working in the design business in 1974 in Nova Scotia, and a few years later got my masters degree from the Royal College of Art. Since then I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked in many studios and ad agencies, and gained diverse experience. Practically every place I have worked, I wound up being the person who could fix problems with physical artworks, equipment and electronic files. That said, I don’t really believe in talent! What succeeds is persistence, curiosity and an empirical approach to problems.

What distinguishes one in this business is what's called a “good eye”. This means an ability to fine tune layouts and typography. What helps me in addition, is a keen eye for any problems, or potential problems, in colour adjustment of photos, brand consistency, spelling and grammar, production specs, project timing and controlling costs. Depth and breadth of experience doesn’t hurt either. With a solid respect for the financial bottom line, and after many years of fine tuning work processes, I have an aptitude for best practices in artwork file structure and file management.

My fine art endeavours: art attack…

I initially started studying fine arts when conceptual art was the dominant force. An exciting and significant period with people like Garry Kennedy, Gerald Ferguson and Vito Acconci on the scene, however for many students it was a difficult nut to crack. I knew I didn’t have enough ideas to succeed, so I switched instead to graphic design. The career accomplished and starvation avoided, I now have the nerve to attempt it again. In a way I have picked up where I left off, in that I still gravitate towards art that has more of an involving basis than pretty pictures and commodities of interior design. Art can be based on verbal and mathematical processes, as opposed to just visual processes.

About this website…

“Fluid” web typography is very exciting. Well, for us designers anyway. Try resizing the window for this page, you'll see what I’m talking about. The layout changes depending on the amount of screen space. I guess you call it “device-independent layout”.

My site is now in its fourth incarnation, and never in a state of completion. This site is done with “webfonts”, (as distinct from "web-safe fonts"). Decent typography has been a long time coming to the web, and it still has a way to go.

In addition to the flexible layout, it uses a Spry accordion, Spry vertical menus, Ajax page building, HTML5, CSS3, invisible hit counters and a dash of JQuery. A lot of moving parts but I never back down from the challenge of getting it all to work.

In the spirit of “what’s old is new”, my site features typographic ornaments from various periods including Victorian and art deco.

So what’s a flexagon?

This is a piece of paper which is folded into a shape that allows it to have more surfaces than it has sides, by flexing or folding it. These flexible polyhedra, so to speak, were popularized by Martin Gardner, who wrote the mathematical games column in Scientific American magazine years ago. The aspect of paper being able to have more surfaces than it has sides, captured my imagination at the time, so I decided it was as good a name as any for my studio. Now, I don’t make a lot of them and I’m no expert, but of course some people are: flexagon.net.