Staple

The last few months I've been deep in a couple of coding projects that use a variety of languages (JS, Python, SQL, PHP, CSS, HTML) and frameworks (Laravel, Wordpress) on bespoke hosting and AWS. While working on Wordpress today I was struck how…

We live on a big piece of rural land and pretty much built everything the wrong way round. We built the house first, shed second and lately the greenhouse last. Next time, if there is one, I think we'll do it in the reverse order. Because I like to…

Our family spent the last six months in Europe, learning German and cycle touring through Germany, France and Spain. When I was asked what my vocation is, my reply often went like this: "I'm a web developer, recently left a job of four years and…

While away I've been having a design competition with myself in my sketch book to come up with a logo for my home valley of Hawea, to be used in a community website and also on a T-Shirt. I've wanted a Hawea T-Shirt for ever. Some scribbling. I like…

My main beef with Facebook as a community tool is its ability to distract people who have good community intentions with commercial and political messages. A platform that has hosted the system that swayed and arguably resulted in the votes for…

I've been a Lastpass user for over 5 years. It's been a great app and I can't recommend enough the use of a password manager: Allows you to have very strong passwords for everything (that you couldn't possibly remember) and a single password/2FA…

I am lucky that my personal design ethics have persevered at Cactus , a company I started in 1992 as a teenager and still retain a small shareholding in over 25 years later. Our mantra was "Gear that wears in not out" and as time passes it is…

The last 9 months have been a period of exploration for me after my wonderful partner packed herself off to a retreat and came back with insights into how our small family might live better and be happier. This resulted in a bunch of divergent…

I used to think design was a discreet, segregated process in which one cloistered themselves in a room somewhere with a box of coloured pencils and a computer. The creative explosion 'process' would happen, then the pruning and refinement. I would…

In my daily work I have been constructing websites for (really?) over twenty years. It started with static html, went to PHP2, then to content management systems like Joomla, Magento, Prestashop, Wordpress, Concrete5 and frameworks like Cake and…

I love designing logos, especially devices. This page is a just a log of my ideas. Here is the current one - I like the simplicity an contrast, it doesn't work so well small (see above in the navbar of this site): Hopefully make some more iterations…