Hi, my name is Alex! I'm a Product Designer, Illustrator and Musician based in beautiful Zeals, Wiltshire.
Not my best side.
Where it all started.
Taking a less traditional route into the industry, I started designing when I was just fourteen years old. My passion for music and involvement in several bands might not immediately scream "Designer" but it was the creativity and friendships that came out of those experiences that led me down the path I'm following today.
Once taking it upon myself to design, code and maintain my own band's web pages, it wasn't long before I was working on other artist's projects. I was always striving for perfection, be it the photography, logo design, album artwork or the website, I had a desire to make the artists look 'bigger' and 'more commercial' than they were. It was from this point that I fell in love with branding and design as a whole.
When I realised I was no Rick Astley.
I continued on my musical path all the way through to University where I studied BA Honours Commercial Music at Bath Spa. Throughout my time there I continued to help other artists with their branding, marketing and web design as well as taking on other freelance projects outside of the music industry. My client base continued to grow, and no sooner than I realised I would never be in One Direction, did I decide to pursue a career in Design.
Back in the day...
I've now been working as a designer in a professional environment for nearly ten years. I spent three years after University working for a great company called Freemax Media, where my responsibilities consisted of creating bespoke email newsletters and landing pages for some of the biggest companies in world. Brands such as Vodafone, British Airways, Apple and Nike. My work was being seen by over 50 million consumers every day. In 2012 I moved on to a company called Techtopia, based in Primrose Hill, London. Techtopia is a unique and stylish Creative Campus for young and exciting technology companies. Their services included providing office space, raising funds for small startups, incubation of, and investment in particularly promising companies. My responsibilities at the campus included working with all the incubated companies and helping them develop their product both visually, and from a user experience point-of-view. I worked with some great people at Techtopia, and fantastic startup companies such as Socialite, Lifecake (now owned by Canon) and CopyPress. After Techtopia I worked on a number of different contacting projects, before taking up a role at Contactually, a startup based in Washington, DC.
Then what?
I joined Contactually in November 2014 and I have been lucky to spend the last, and best two years of my career (so far!) working there! I joined an awesome team as the sole Product Designer and was immediately blown away by the great product I was working on. I initially led all of the design efforts on the product itself and was heavily involved in feature development, improving both the user experience and user interface of the application and completely redesigning the accompanying iOS and Android applications. More recently, I have focused my efforts on revamping the marketing site and strengthening the brand with a living style guide. I decided in May 2017 that I wanted to find a new challenge, I feel that Contactually is in a great position for the future and I hope my ideas and work over the years has helped get them there.
Things I know.
Sketch. Photoshop. Illustrator. Flinto. HTML. CSS. Plus many other things that are not relevant here.