Apr. ’20 »

Lead Creative

BetVictor, Gibraltar

Working on creative campaigns and branding for several brands, UK and Asia facing.

Jun. ’19 – March – ’20

Visual Designer

Bet4Pride, Spain

Full-stack visual design for a start-up gaming company. Logo and branding design through website UI design to marketing visuals and down into email design and build.

Feb. ’19 – April ’20

Freelance Visual Design

Matero Games Branding

Dec. ’16 – Feb. ’19

UI Designer

William Hill Online, Gibraltar

A move into a pure UX/UI environment. Part of the sportsbook team – working on mobile/web projects such as the World Cup pages (football), market templates, the betslip. Involved in two rebranding exercises. Working with UX leads, Product Owners and liaising with the devs to get things out in an Agile manner. Learnt to use Sketch (the macOS web design app) from zero to setting up responsive symbol libraries and integrating JSON data in our mockups. Annotations! A very interesting two years working deep in the nitty-gritty of sports betting product design.

Sept. ’11 – Dec. ’16

Senior Graphic Designer

Mansion Group, Gibraltar

An entertaining and satisfying five-years of visual design for this online-casino operator in Gibraltar. Work involved resolving a broad range of design problems, some of which involved technical/dev solutions. High turnover in marketing campaigns provided plenty of scope for creativity…

Working with retention, conversion, optimisation and SEO teams on

• • Marketing promo design 
  • Responsive landing page design and build
  • Responsive/fluid email design and build
  • Mobile app design (Jackpotland mobile app)
  • Casino.com homepage redesign
  • Application design (Casino.com Italian download client)
  • Instigating, designing and building an HTML Email template engine in PHP
  • Icon design
  • Designing offline mailers (print) 
  • Design and build of Wordpress mini-sites (Bulgarian recruitment site plus two internal WordPress blogs for Design and HR depts)
  • Instigating the reporting of trends in users’ devices and screens for web and email design
  • Ad hoc company photographer

Sept. ’10 – Sept. ’11

Graphic Designer

Club La Costa, Fuengirola, Spain

Hired as the lead graphic designer for the new-ish direct marketing department of this long-established holiday company. Our remit was to produce designs with broader market appeal and a greater conversion focus than the other two design teams in the company. We worked-up both the designs and code for websites, landing pages and HTML emails for new portals and brands as well as bending existing brands and websites to our nefarious marketing ends. Joking aside – this was a really interesting ride in this challenging environment where I learnt a lot about online marketing.

• • Designed and built Marina-del-Sol mini-site
  • Worked with pre-existing portal designs and CSS frameworks (Blueprint)
  • Designed and built a lot of marketing emails with landing pages
  • Redesigned and built HTML form-heavy conversion-focused landing pages for HolidayPrizeWorld
  • Designed a new company portal.
  • Hacked together a localhost PHP template system to speed work on custom web page designs.

May ’09 – Sept. ’11

Freelance Web Development & Graphic Design

Often taking a secondary role in the design process I created websites for my own clients and as a contractor. I provided fully functioning CMS driven platforms and coaching in both site maintenance and SEO for a few small to medium-sized businesses. Working with open-source CMSs, awkward CMSs and templating engines of my own devices, I’d build usable, standards-based, SEO friendly and semantic templates from PHP, CSS and jQuery.

DCC International Property

A lot of my work came from DCC (see below) who still needed a designer if not an entire creative department. Mostly working on the website and keeping the email campaigns going for them. I was responsible for optimising the site for search which led to a page one SERP for certain key terms.

Solutions Overseas

Designed and built a CMS driven website for Solutions Overseas. This company had about a hundred pages of static content and the desire to keep growing. Working from an existing identity I developed their new site using the open-source Content Management System MODx.

Digital DJ Tips

Design and build of a custom WordPress theme for a former colleague. Designed simply to appeal to the target market allowing for long-form content and advertising. I developed a custom “Loop” to display an easily adaptable grid of posts on the home page. Cufon used for typographic richness.

Homes and Travel.co.uk

Design and development of a custom theme for this international property magazine style WordPress driven site. The logo was designed to be reminiscent of a newspaper masthead and uses pure CSS (I’d never kerned HTML before!). The theme is a slight variation of the open-source Carrington framework.

Darragh Macanthony.com

Custom WordPress theme. Built from a supplied Photoshop visual, taking advantage of new menu functionality in WP3.

Investment Property Vultures

WordPress site design and build. Website needed in a hurry. Pre-existing logo but not much else. Hack of the default theme – site uses some extra plug-ins to keep the exclusive member content exclusive. Design using a simple typographic approach with care taken over tabular data readability.

Villa Mirador

Photography and site build for a 20M € villa in Marbella. Built-out from a supplied visual of the homepage.

Restaurante Santiago

Site build. Working from a supplied visual of the homepage this restaurant site was created using PHP, jQuery. Pulls a the image gallery from Flickr.

EST Group

Site build, working from PSD – HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Jardines del Albaicin

Photography, layout & build of website for this real estate development. HTML, CSS, jQuery.

Top Andalucia

Logo design & business cards.

Dead Good Undies

2011 print campaign in specialist UK magazines.

Dec. ’08 — May ’09

Graphic Designer

DCC International Property, Marbella, Spain

An offshoot of MRI (below), I continued working with many previous colleagues, working on the main website and producing other marketing materials. Much of my work was on the main web site and involved integrating internal and external database engines into (internally created property listings, WordPress, third party multiple listing systems and email marketing). I produced and reported on the weekly email marketing campaigns. By the end of my time here I considered myself HTML and CSS competent and PHP aware.

Aug. ’06 — Dec. ’08

Chief Designer, OPTV Magazine

MRI Overseas Property, Marbella, Spain

Hired to head-up the editorial design for this international real estate magazine. Established production standards, developed a strong core look with a contemporary typographic feel and a strong but flexible layout grid. Working for a hands-off art director with a junior creative designer we produced c.70 pages of high-quality editorial per month. High-end property photography became another enjoyable part of this job. Later as the marketing focus of the department moved to the web I stepped in to help with the creation of mini-sites, landing pages and email marketing campaigns. My first full web design-and-build job was MRI Direct. A dozen or so property developments were featured in-depth; with gallery slideshows, videos and floor plans, contact forms and various calIs-to-action. I built and, other than an original visual for the homepage, designed the site. This is where I first cut my teeth on CSS, JQuery and basic PHP. Read me a copy of Don’t Make Me Think [such an important book about usability and the web].

May ’02 – Oct. ’04

Production Manager

Scott & Jones Communications, Brighton, UK

Joined the in-house contract publishing studio to raise the ad design standard and streamline the production process for Coinslot (full-colour weekly; c. 20pp, 50% ads), CasinoReview (full colour monthly; c. 32pp, 40% ads) plus several annual supplements and catalogues. Taking on the work of three part-timers; Ad Production, Production Control and Admin, I set up a Mac OS X Server, standardised the production Macs and re-organised the production process: more efficient, better quality pages at a lower cost. Editorial design for the RAL Leader magazine (in-house publication of the Rank Group) and producing the annual UK press campaign for sportswear company uhlsport.

Nov. ’00 – May ’02

Freelance Print Design & Artwork

Contracting for the ad production dept. at William Reed Publishing on two of their weeklies; Morning Advertiser and The Grocer. Setting classified, display and advertorial ads, checking agency supplied artwork for pre-press errors, laying up the ad pages and out-putting PDF. Providing training and support was another part of my role in that busy studio. Designed and produced SussexCares (full-colour quarterly; 32pp, 50% ads) for Findon Publishing. Miscellaneous print and web-site jobs, including co-designing the website for Brighton designer goods store, Caz Systems.

Nov. ’00 – Oct. ’01

Artworker

The Freelance Store, Brighton, UK

Oct. ’99 – Oct. ’00

Artworker

Miracle Macs, Brighton region, UK

Jul. ’98 – Sept. ’99

Production assistant

New Insight Magazine

Feb. ’97 – Jun. ’98

Motion & print graphics

No Labels/Fringe TV