MORE ABOUT ME

I started my career in advertising and design as a storyboard artist almost 20 years ago, at J Walter Thompson, an advertising agency in Johannesburg, South Africa. Before that, I'd tried studying Civil Engineering at the University of Natal in Durban. Maths and science are not my thing, but it was the last days of Apartheid and like everyone in my class at school, I was trying to avoid being conscripted into the army. So I went to university. Unfortunately I didn't have a clue what the lecturers were talking about, so I ended up going to the army anyway. Not a pleasant experience, but interesting - I ended up as an electronic warfare operator. I spent my days sitting atop a mountain in the north of South Africa, surrounded by banks of computers and radios, listening in to our neighbour's military and police networks. My main task was cracking a code which changed its codeword once a month, and updating an intelligence report on a specific unit. Fortunately, Nelson Mandela was released from prison while I was still in training, and the time we had to serve was immediately reduced by almost half. Thank you Mr Mandela! The strange thing was that, as familiar a figure as he is now, none of us had even seen a picture of him before that, due to government censorship - the only one I remember seeing in a bookstore had been scribbled over with a black marker prior to printing.

I didn't really know what to do when I got out, but I'd been drawing since I was a small kid, so the most logical thing seemed to study Graphic Design. I did this first at what was then Natal Technicon in Durban, and then at Inscape Design College in Johannesburg. I wanted to start off in a top advertising agency, so I got hold of the studio manager at JWT and went to see him, portfolio under my arm. He liked my work, but there weren't any jobs available. I already had an income though, shipping women's shoes up from a factory in Durban and selling them at flea markets around Johannesburg on the weekends. So I asked if I could just hang around the studio and try learn as much as I could. The studio boss said yes, and after 3 months they started paying me a freelance wage. After another 3 months they hired me as an assistant storyboard artist. It was a good place to start, working under the direction of very experienced art directors, on some of the world's biggest brands - Ford and Kellogg's amongst others. I learned a lot.

After a year at JWT, I got a job as an illustrator and DTP operator at FCB/Partnership In Advertising and Marketing, another of the big Johannesburg advertising agencies, working on brands such as Castle Lager, Cadbury, Yamaha and Bic. After another year, I got promoted to art director. I got off to another good start, with my first TV commercial being shot for British Airways at Gatwick Airport. The ad ended up being used all over the world for many years. It was, I think, BA's longest-running ad ever.

After a year and a half of this, however, I'd had enough of the angst-laden corporate, and crime-ridden social scenes of Johannesburg. I started looking around for a job in my hometown, Durban. Coincidentally, a job had come up as head of the creative department at Ogilvy and Mather, on the tropical island of Mauritius. I'd grown up seeing TV commercials about the place, and had always dreamed of going there. So I applied for it. Surprise, surprise, I actually got the job, and flew off into the wild blue yonder on a one-year contract. What an experience. I went from being an art director in Johannesburg, one of many, to being under the spotlight in the comparitively tiny business environment of Mauritius, in an important position in the island's biggest ad agency. It was all sand, sea, sex and sun. And an enormous amount of work! Mauritius is a very, very busy place. I had to learn to do 5 times the number of ads, while trying to keep creative standards up, because I knew I'd have to return to South Africa, and show my portfolio to ad agencies when I applied for jobs. I also had a lot more graphic design to do than I'd had in Johannesburg: working in Above The Line ad agencies is all about coming up with creative concepts, and doing mostly TV, magazine and newspaper ads. But because the environment in Mauritius was so much smaller, the company was a Through The Line ad agency, which meant I had to be a logo designer, brochure designer and annual report designer too. Amongst many other things. I also didn't see any reason to stop doing all my own illustration. So there was a broad range of work, and a lot of it. I managed to cope, and the agency ended up winning most of the advertising awards on the island, which led to a sharp increase in business.

Living on a tropical island isn't always what it's cracked up to be though. "Island Fever" is an affliction understood by all of Mauritius's expats. It's a tiny place, about 70km by 40km. Over 80% is covered by sugar cane, with over 1 million people crammed into the rest. There's a distinct lack of privacy, and gossip is rife. Also, the island is caught in a time warp, with the inhabitants having been stuck in the middle of the Indian Ocean for hundreds of years. Until the advent of tourism in the 1980's, and the Internet in the late 1990's, they had little contact with the rest of the world. Business attitudes were thus very small and old-fashioned, which irked me no end. I got desperately homesick, and after a year headed back to South Africa, first freelancing at my old agency, which had been bought out by Publicis, the big French group, and then at last moving back to Durban to work at TBWA Hunt Lascaris. There I worked on advertising accounts such as Nando's Chicken and The Sharks. But I soon missed the benefits of the expat lifestyle - not

having to pay for much, except food and toiletries, and not having to worry about annoying details like income tax, which the company took care of. Plus, I missed the island - there's something about that emerald blue-green sea that just does it for me. So I phoned them up and asked for my old job back. They said yes, so off I went for another year of winning all the local awards and being a big fish in a small pond. When I came back, I took a break from advertising for almost a year, trying to market an organic product, and then getting my introduction to website design, while working for a small Johannesburg web design company for 6 months. But the island life still had a strong pull, and back I went as a creative consultant, but this time at Saatchi and Saatchi. Island Fever struck again, and after a year I returned to Durban in South Africa.

I got a job at a small ad agency / graphic design studio there. I was asked to analyse their Traffic system, which was in a parlous state, and while doing so had an idea for an automated workflow processor, a computer program attached to a website. The concept seemed to hit me like a bolt from the blue. It still does: I think that the system would solve 90% of the problems which I'd encountered in all the agencies I'd worked for. Whether they were big, medium or small, it always boiled down to the same thing: it is very difficult to manage the process of creating a large number of relatively small projects, each of which have many deadlines. An agency with say, 300 jobs in its system, all in various states of completion, finds it all but impossible to cope effectively with the 1500 or more deadlines involved. It leads to all sorts of troubles, from division between the creative and client service departments, to unhappy clients, to art directors, copywriters and creative directors operating under immense strain and acting like complete lunatics.

So, armed with this idea (and nothing else except my portfolio), I quit my job. The aim was to set up the world's first real online advertising agency - which still hasn't been done by anyone else, as far as I've seen. The dream was to set up a network of creatives and client service people connected by a super-efficient, fully-automated Traffic boss. Which would leave me free to travel the world with my laptop, doing fantastic creative work in fabulously exotic places. Hmmm.

Since then my life has been interesting, to say the least. I've been involved in all sorts of situations which I'd never imagined could happen, and learned all sorts of things which I'd never even guessed at before. I've carried on though, with this beautiful dream leading me on, and have only gone back to ad agencies or design companies for a few months at a time, when things have gotten really desperate. But I've learned. For a start, I've learned that human beings are more peculiar than I'd realised. A series of rude shocks awaited me out there. One of the most important things so far, and part of improving my knowledge of website design, has been to learn about Search Engine Optimisation, a field which hardly even existed when I started out. It consists of ensuring that prospective clients find my website when they type in anything from "graphic design" to "ad agencies," from "freelance graphic designers" to "advertising companies." This, it seems to me, is the way of the future. Although it's still in its infancy, Google continues to get more and more important to the way the world operates, and my website continues to do well, and I continue to get more and more interesting enquiries through my site. At present, there's more people that see my portolio than any other graphic designer/art director on the continent. Never before has an African graphic designer had so many people around the world looking at his portfolio.

It's still, as ever, all about building up my graphic design, advertising, illustration and web design portfolios. And somewhere along the way, I started doing cartoons for fun. Apart from the difficulties involved, I like this footloose and fancy-free lifestyle. It sure beats offices, anyway.

Haven't made it around the world yet, but I've certainly made it around Southern Africa. Cape Town, that prettiest of cities, is the closest thing I could consider to a home base, but I've travelled all over the place. I've lived in big cities and mud-hut villages, on the beach and in the mountains. At time of writing I'm in Howick, about to head off to Cape St Francis. Before that it was Port St Johns, before that I stayed at Magwa Falls for two months, having come from Johannesburg and before that, Plettenberg Bay. Other places include Coffee Bay, Durban, Hogsback, East London, Bathurst, Port Elizabeth and Knysna. I rarely stay in one place longer than a few months, but work through the Internet with clients from as far afield as the United States, although more often from Cape Town and Johannesburg. I sometimes do tourism websites to earn my keep - it's nice being around people who're on holiday. I used to sit in offices for up to 18 hours a day, getting fat, and feeling either frustrated or bored. Now I know a bit more about what goes on beyond the four walls of the corporate world. More of what life is all about than your average office worker. Once I did a roadtrip with a sex-crazed American millionairess, catching minibus taxis through South Africa, Swaziland, Mozambique and Malawi. Real Africa, done in the real African way. I sat in the boiling sun on the beach at Lake Malawi drawing, of all things, a cartoon of a penguin on a snowboard for a soft-drinks packaging company in Johannesburg. That was a memorable experience - I hope they keep coming.