Résumé:
About
I've been passionate about building and designing websites, writing content and making online user-experiences better since 2001.
I'm from Manchester, live in Zürich and lived in London most of my adult life. I've worked on a diverse range of projects from small SMB websites whilst at The University of Salford all the way up to million-page-hits-per-day websites during my 4 years at the BBC and 7 years at Google.
Music is also a passion of mine and when I'm not writing and recording albums or performing live under the pseudonym 'Albert Man', I'm generating loads of content for my ever expanding artist website, albertman.com, which I've been responsible for since 2014.
I am currently working for Lufthansa as a UX Designer working across multiple specialised flight navigation applications. These solutions are used to support the flight operations of over 200 airlines worldwide.
I love to design
I’ve always been designing things, ever since I made my own magic show flyers at the age of 10. I’ve been using Photoshop and Illustrator since I started my career and Adobe XD more recently. I often like to design on-the-fly with HTML and CSS. I also use Sketch on a daily basis and InVision for quick prototyping using the Craft plugin to sync my artboards.
I design a lot for Albert Man Music and Music Makers Festival (our own annual music festival) having designed countless posters, banners, flyers, programmes, cover art, album sleeves, t-shirts and promotional material over the years, both for online and print.
I love to code
Front-end development is something I've enjoyed doing for the last 18 years. I'm an expert in HTML and CSS and love creating responsive simple markup.
Most of the projects I work on also involve JavaScript and PHP however over the years I've had to code using many different scripting languages, starting with ASP at The University of Salford and later using Django at Google. At the BBC I also used XSSI, XML and XSLT and Ruby on Rails.
I had a great time building my own website, albertman.com, and finding creative ways to generate content, such as using the Songkick API to generate my gig’s list using PHP.
I love to organise content
For me it's a bit like cleaning the house. You assess everything you need to tidy away then proceed methodically until everything is in order. It's really satisfying to know you’ve helped people get the information they need as as quickly and easily as possible, by structuring, labelling and laying out your content well.
I'm an expert at organising content for different types of websites and I really enjoy making it the most accessible it can be.
I love to write content
Spending time really getting to know a product or service is key when it comes to writing about it. It's great finding the right language and tone for a specific brand and to ensure that the content is as accessible as possible with the key information easy to find.
When I was an Information Architect at Google I worked on many projects where I partnered with marketing stakeholders in order to help get their message across to the millions of users in a clear, concise and useful way (without sounding like a sales pitch). These projects spanned many products including AdWords, Google Enterprise, Mobile, DotOrg and Google [X].
I love to make music
Writing my own songs and performing them live, on my own, and with bandmates is something I’ve been enjoying since 2014. Prior to that I’d played in many bands and did a few tours in Germany.
Just as I love writing online content I also love writing lyrics and have written well over 100 songs with my favourites making it onto the EPs and albums I’ve released as Albert Man.