Hi, and welcome to my site! I’m Ollie, the current Senior Designer at TouchLocal.com, a local review site for local businesses. We have just done a huge re-build into Ruby-on-Rails and are just about to launch my new front-end design and css. This site, ok:design, is a one-man company, where I can explore more exciting freelance work outside my 9-to-5! I’m one of those lucky people who love what they’re doing and actually get to make a decent living out of it. I am also working on two projects that should be finished this year. I am very excited about them, but for now, just know that they’re very cool!
Growing up, I was drawing every day (Mainly football players!), and as soon as I was able to, I moved onto computer-based art. After high school and college, I went onto my art foundation year at Alton College. This was my favourite year of studying art and design due to the incredibly large amount of freedom they give you! After this I went onto Huddersfield University to study Design Communication.
Up until about two years ago, I was primarily a print designer, but was lucky enough to have some internet-design friends, who gave me a quick study into the ways of the web. Like trying a hard drug for the first time, my initiation led to hardcore addiction, and I’ve been hooked on webdesign ever since! Print and web together complete my design portfolio.
I am both a designer and a front-end coder. I design in my sketchbook, Illustrator, Photoshop, inDesign and Flash. I also build standards compliant websites in Valid XHTML and CSS within textmate. I have a background working in JAVA, Ruby on Rails and PHP environments. That just about covers most of it!
About this site
This site was built on Wordpress 2.5. For a lot of the PHP and ability for custom classes for the blog, I used the great Sandbox theme, altering it to my own custom theme (I am a designer at heart and prefer not to get to deep into the development, as much fun as it is!). The front-end is all designed and built by me in almost valid XHTML and validCSS.
Some more about me
My other loves outside of design are music and sport. My musical influences come from all over, but started after hearing a lot of hip-hop when I was younger. I purchased my first pair of turntables when I was 16 and inspired me to DJ. Cue a ridiculous amount of record buying and late nights perfecting it, some terrible gigs when I first started out and a huge learning curve.
After meeting with some like-minded friends who had already started a night, I came onboard as lead designer and DJ of Repercussion, an agency promoting drum and bass, hip-hop, house, breaks, dub-step, soul, funk and everything in-between. We hosted club night's for the next 4 years, from Nottingham to Woking, then to London, culminating in two huge nights working with Goldie and Metalheadz, amongst others. Through these connections I was able to play in Europe and America, as well as across the UK. It’s still something I love doing and will be pushing myself back out there this year. Check out my music page for my latest mixes!
I love Football, Rugby, Basketball and Golf. I was playing all 4 of them from a young age until I had to have major knee surgery, which killed all my dreams of playing basketball at High School in the States. I still follow all of them actively, particularly Liverpool FC in the football, Ireland in the rugby, and Tiger Woods in the Golf!
