Chapter 8: Going digital

June 2009 - May 2013

It was quite hard to work out the title for this chapter. I thought about a few names, but these only referred to a few moments. In general it was a period of moving away from the graphic design for physical things, towards learning how to design digital things.

After leaving EMI and my flat in London, it was a bit like the end of University, I was leaving a place I’d been living & working at for several years, and heading back to live with my folks. It did seem like the end of an era, and so was a good time to stop and re-assess where I was going career-wise. I was back in the south of France, and so it only seemed right to start painting again. During this long summer break I worked on a few new art pieces.

I had a few friends who came to visit me that summer and stayed at our house, but it was also a tough few months that summer as I didn’t see my girlfriend for a long period as she was still away touring with Duffy, so I don’t think it was until September that she finally made it over to visit.

It was later into autumn, that I then made the decision it was time to head back to London and find a new job. With nothing guaranteed, and nowhere to live, I managed to persuade a few friends to let me stay with them whilst I started to attempt to get job interviews again.

I had kept busy with some odd bits of freelance design work - an ex-EMI colleague sent me a few email newsletter templates to design. Plus a friend of a friend got me some extra freelance work for Universal Music too. I can remember working on the Kick-ass film soundtrack artwork, plus some other music packaging for a new band called Pretty Reckless, and some printed fanzine designs for some other new acts to hand out during their live tour shows.

The couch-surfing tour took me around Putney, Herne Hill, Cambridge and Hertfordshire - each friend allowing me to stay around a week and I was living out a suitcase.

Whilst staying in London I had a few job interviews and did two weeks of freelance work on-site at Jack Wills fashion HQ. If i’m honest it was awful, and the manager there just seemed to be trying lots of people out, but I wasn’t feeling comfortable at all. I think I must have thought after music, maybe fashion would be the next logical step, but it had too many similarities to the music industry and I didn’t want to go back into another environment like that. Whilst I stayed with friends I still had some freelance work coming through which I could do remotely. My brother Al at this point was working at The National Trust Osterley Park - and I spent a week there as a volunteer gardening assistant. It was good to see what kinds of work Al was doing, and I also realised how physical the work was.

I ended up staying with my friends Sarah & Rob in Hertfordshire for the longest period. They kindly put me up for at least a couple of weeks, and it also materialised that a job interview around that way came up at Tesco.com - I thought it might be a good company to get on the CV, and it was for a mid-weight web designer role, and I managed to get the job.

After that I quickly found myself a flat, but with my other ex-housemates dispersed and me needing to start work quickly - I took a 1-bed flat rental in Hertford, which was close-by to the Tesco offices in Welwyn Garden City. My brother Al was also close-by, he was living in Welwyn also with his new girlfriend.

Outside London, I needed a car to get to work, and got a VW Golf from a second-hand dealer quite quickly - I think they saw me coming… I chose an old banger at the back of the yard, it had leather seats, but I definitely overpaid for it. I also did one of the stupidest things within weeks of owning it. I used to have to park it a bit further away from my town centre flat - on a nearby residential tree-lined street. One day I walked over after a few days of not using it, and noticed all the bird poo on the bonnet & roof. The stains were not coming off with splashes of water, so I thought it would make sense to get a metal scourer on it, it was the only way to get this muck off. I learnt the hard way when I noticed lots of paint had also been scratched off in the process. To this day my brother still brings this up as one of my lowest points.

Living on my own was lonely at times, it made me appreciate good company & friends more. I did get into Super-8 cameras & film-making at this point, having picked up an old camera at a French market in the summer, I then went off to East London one day & did a beginners day-course. It was super interesting but also showed me how it was a labour of love, mainly due to the material costs and rarity of film cartridge stock left to use.

I feel looking back that I learned a fair amount of new things working at Tesco, but it was the corporate culture and other designer (let’s just he had a strong personality) that made it a chore to go in each day. It wasn’t clear what I was going to be working on at first, but eventually I was moved onto a project to re-design the Tesco Direct website - which was their non-food part of the business. The project wasn’t particularly stable, and staffing and priorities kept changing. But it was a new experience and something to build on. I enjoyed some experiences I had to spend a week working with an external agency called Flow and also LBi - and this was where I was looking at the online checkout re-design. I was learning about user journeys and then bringing wireframes to life so that they looked like the finished user experience, and applying the Tesco brand to all the visual assets. They also sent me to work at the photography studios in Milton Keynes for a week, which was interesting as it led to improvements to all the online photography - which had been really poor up until this point. The other thing I really liked working on was website icons - and I went about creating the first uniform set that Tesco could use online.

After 18 months I found another job, and I’d decided that I missed the hectic fast pace of London work life, or maybe it had been drilled into me. With the next job I also switched to living with housemates again. I posted an ad on a housemates website, and found a couple people through this. We moved to Saint Albans - which was still outside London, but had faster train routes into the city, and suited my new job location - which was London Victoria, working for Lastminute.com.

Unfortunately it had a similar corporate culture which I didn’t enjoy, and I didn’t find the work particularly enjoyable either. I think I was just struggling to adapt and settle into this new digital world after a long period in the music industry, and by trying to shift into a new design medium, there was still a lot to learn. I also felt like the old guy working with lots of younger digitally-savvy designers that had progressed straight into digital, but I’d come from a traditional design background and at times felt lost.

It was the beginning of 2012 when I left Lastminute, and stumbled into an interview at Ancestry. I didn’t have too high hopes for this either, a recruiter had found me and pointed me towards them for an interview - it was a temporary maternity leave cover contract. Their office was back in Hammersmith, West London, not far from the old music industry haunts. However Ancestry had a beautiful modern office overlooking the river - very close to the old TFI Friday television studios. I loved working here - and even today I look back now and it was one of my favourite jobs. I loved the combination of user interface design with creative marketing - I was able to source amazing vintage photography and combine them with historical record documents. As the lead designer I got involved in many aspects of work including print-based graphic design, web-design, live event exhibition set design & oversaw the development of the latest UK TV advert, which came via an external design agency.

At this point with the job location and feeling quite settled at Ancestry, I moved back into London - initially going for an Airbnb whilst I figured out where to live. I was living with a nice lady called Tricia who lived in East Sheen, not too far from my old flat in Putney! I ended up staying with her for about a year! After a week of Airbnb we agreed our own informal rental contract.

We got on well, she was a graphic designer too, and she had a really fun personality. She welcomed me into her home and I met a few of her friends too. We started watching Breaking Bad together when it came out, and we got hooked!

One day I met Tricia’s dad, who came to visit from Canada - where he lived. Tricia still had her accent, but was technically British - with her dad actually originating from Whitley Bay, in North-East of England. One weekend when I was staying down in London (rather than on the train up north) Tricia was having a few friends over. Her dad made amazing margaritas, and later that evening pulled out a photo he carried around of him and his brother when they met Marilyn Monroe! It was a good story he told of how he was randomly on a road trip, at the same time as some filming was happening, and he managed to sneak down and get a photo. I think he even ended up being an extra in the film somehow - don’t ask me which film it was though.

For me the work at Ancestry suited me really well - it was busy and really varied work. The team of people were all great too - it was a small UK team and with the subject matter being family history, I think it kind of rubbed off in everyone, making it like working with family in a way. Socially it was a fun place to be, there were a few sporty types in the office, so I used to go jogging sometimes at lunchtime. We’d all have lunch together every Friday, which was paid for by the owners, and with us being part of an American company, I had the opportunity to visit their new San Francisco as well as original Provo, Utah HQ - where the business originated from.

After a year living with Tricia, I decided to have a change and live with a work friend from Ancestry. Pretty much at the point we decided to be housemates, we were both leaving Ancestry too. I was at the end of my maternity cover contract, but there was an extra few months before the designer I was covering for wanted to come back, so at the end of my contract, I asked if I could freelance for a while instead. Once they agreed, it set the ball rolling for the next period of my work, and I wanted to save up some money. I was already thinking it might soon be time to leave London permanently, and maybe head up north…