I seldom go into a pitch thinking “damn it, we better get this because quite frankly, I reckon I’ve nailed this one”. Our print division Clinic hold the Virgin Mega Store UK account, and when the job of redesigning their AWFUL website came up, One Shoe stepped up to the plate…

This was handed to me by my boss Johnny Jizzo as “ok this isn’t a design job, what I want you to do is put together a really really good wireframe visual, remember, it’s NOT a design job”. So I started designing it. I mean come on, you don’t invite an alcoholic to a wine tasting afternoon and not expect him to think it’s a piss up, so don’t ask a designer to not design something!

How bad ass does this look? It’s like that evil dude from the movie Krull posing for a Slayer album cover. Yeah you could say I was happy to work on this one. The brief was to create a half/half sort of website, with a big graphical flash area at the top, and some basic but tidy html design below to house all the info which would be pulled in from press releases and the like…

One of my last bit of pitch work at One Shoe was this corporate site for the GMG, the publishing group responsible for UK newspapers such as The Guardian and The Observer. This was one of those classic bits of turbo design, where the brief is handed to you Thursday morning, for a presentation on Friday…

Eyestorm is a commercial art gallery sitting in the shadow of the Tate Modern. Well, not that the sun shines enough in London to cast a shadow, but you get the picture. Late 2006 they approached Clinic/One Shoe to redesign their website and corporate identity. Flying blind on the web design as the logo was still in development, I put together a design that…

I’m not into cars and racing and Brocky king of the mountain and stuff like that, but rally driving I have to say I have a bit of a thing for. Ok look I can’t pretend that I loved it so much that I made sure I got a hold of this job, the truth is it came in, someone had to do it, I did it, I’m not happy about it, but what’s done is done can’t we just move on and be friends.

We, well not me, we One Shoe did some work for Royal & Sun Alliance, and asked us to put together a blog design for their CEO Bridget McIntyre. The task was to create a range of tones, from a super corporate look, to a more personal less business like design. Which is a little hard when you have absolutely no idea about someone’s personal tastes or interests…

This one I quite enjoyed and seemed to come together quite quickly. The idea is that the site opens up like an accordian, which I thought was quite an apt nav system since the product, a jet ski type thing, was named Zippa…

I can’t tell you how exciting it was to be in London for the World Cup. The idiots with flags on their cars. The press proclaiming Rooney as the messiah reborn with a boot. The common not so unspoken truth that we had NO chance… hang on a minute, I’m an Aussie. It was bloody unreal. That Croatia match, my god…

I’m not fussed about working on big brands. Coke, Apple, Sony… at the end of the day it’s all got to look good on a page. That said, I do feel that I am above the seedy world of chat lines, straight or gay, so I was more than happy to be handed this job with everyone quietly laughing at me…

This is what they call in the biz, “the moment of truth”. Thanks to Hurricane Marklew I had my first sit down with a London design agency and for some stupid reason they agreed to put me on for a job pitching for the redesign of internet service provider Be’s website…

After FPC Magazines’ first attempt at a weekly trash mag went a tad awry, they refocused and recycled the trash into The Star Enquirer. Naturally they wanted a website, and naturally they had no idea what it should be. My boss suggested a blog, and the rest as they say is history…

To date this would have to be the most ambitious web project I’ve ever done. Mid 2005 we were advised that FPC Magazines was launching a new monthly magazine for women to compete with behemoth titles such as The Australian Women’s Weekly...

In 2004 FPC Courier were developing a gigantic nation-wide real estate listing website Homehound, in conjunction with a third party developer. After a few rejected rounds of concept designs, I was asked to “have a crack” in the hope to speed up the process…

As with any business that’s not sitting around contemplating it’s navel, housekeeping is always the last job that gets a look in. As a matter of urgency I designed a rather bland but functional corporate site for FPC Magazines...

While Vogue web developer extroadinairre David Lewis was away on holidays, I was asked to put together a design concept for a new Vogue title aimed at the pre-teen market, Voguegirl. The tone was to be girly but not tacky, young but not immature…

As part of my fairweather involvement with Ben Webster’s web design company Conversant Studios, I designed this mock-up for an industrial design company who needed to update their “flash for flash’s sake” website…

9to5 is a weekly “street press” style magazine, distributed for free in the CBD of Sydney. In 2004 the title received a much needed make-over, a new image, and a shiny new website to match…

Through FPC’s creative services department, we were asked to provide a design for a newsletter template as part of a pitch for a deal with the department store chain Myer. Myer One was their personalised rewards program for frequent shoppers…

Truth be told, I think I designed this one in my sleep. As summer started to really kick in, the project of designing websites for The Weekender and Weekender Noosa community papers came up…

As part of our “teaching print devotees about the web” campaign, FPC Online created basic micro sites, solely designed to represent the brand online and to push subscriptions. In 2004 these micro sites needed a make-over, and we came up with a “no nav” template…

In 2004, we finally got the go-ahead to create a web shop for all of FPC’s magazine subscriptions. At the time it had neither a name or a look, making it one of the few websites I’ve had to create from a completely blank page…

There’s an old saying in showbusiness that “you should never work with children or animals”. Someone should ad musos to that adage. In Conversant Studios mode Ben Webster and I were asked to put together a brochure site for Forte Productions...

Another test of how well my template was working, when it came time to beef up the Australian Good Taste website, everything seemed to come together in the kitchen and we whipped it up in a flash…

With the design for Overlander approved and in the build, I started to apply the same template to update the Modern Boating website, it too desparately in need of an easier to update and manage makeover…

This would have to be one of the first sites I designed for FPC. In 2004 I was just starting to wind down as editor of the Fast Fours VIP website, and started to turn my (alleged) editorial talents into (alleged) design talents. Either that or I just got bored…

In 2003 when my cousin’s photography business really started to take off, she got wind that I dabbled in web design and asked me to put together some ideas for a website. At the time her main business was wedding photography, so I “went all ornate on they ass” and channelled…