šø Music: Pink Floyd
š½ļø Movie: Pulp Fiction
š Humour: George Carlin
š§ Podcast: Lex Fridman
š§Philosophy: Absurdism
š Book: Fear &Ā Loathing
āļø Hobby: Writing
I'm John, from gloomy Melbourne, Australia.
Iāve been a Designer since 2009, amongst other things.
That's all you need to know. Read no further if you're actually considering working with me.
My journey into tech was born out of fun and pain. IĀ grew up in the PS2 era, so naturally, armed with Tony Hawks, GTA andĀ JakĀ &Ā Daxter, IĀ found religion at a young age. I was quite devoted. In fact, my worship was often met with my bible being taken away from me. Alas, IĀ also grew up in the Win 95 - Vista and dial-up era. I had 99 problems, and learning how download Pamela Andersonās Playboy cover discography via Limewire, on a sub 30kbps connection, then burn the files onto a CD and clear any traces before the sun rose ā not to mention trying not to infect my aunty and uncles PC with a 'trojan', whatever the hell that was ā were some of my problems. You can imagine my pain.
As the years went on, my pain grew. My new, shitty ~$500 Windows Vista infected laptop that my mum slaved to buy me, seemed like it was spawned by Bill Gates &Ā Steve Ballmer just to torment me. IĀ know IĀ found religion at a young age, but Jesus Christ. Aside from death and taxes, if one thing is true, it's that when you're poor, 13 years old and try to boost the performance of your PC by messing with Regedit one too many times, you either set yourself up for a career in IT, or lay your circuits to rest. It was at this age I became a techno-masochist.
After becoming Certified by Microsoft (informally) for troubleshooting, formatting and the volume installation of Windows, it was all gravy. From sneaking a cmd script onto my friends computer-illiterate dads PC, that triggered when he opened IE and posed as a stalker, informing him he was being watched and his son is in danger (we all got a good laugh out of this); to cracking the neighbours Wi-Fi using a dictionary hack, fuelled by an Xbox addiction that had our household modem unplugged and banned; to having my cousin teach me HTML&CSS at cafe's, while driving us around our hometown in the Dandenong Ranges, searching for where Julian Assange lived; to learning how to Photoshop late passes and the signatures of my overlords, this whole computer thing seemed full of possibility.
Fast forward a few years and I started tinkering with games. Mainly editing .ini and .dll files to downgrade graphics below the minimum settings, to get >30fps. Times were rough. Then IĀ got into modding GTA:SA:Ā replacing textures with my own, editing save files and stats. This led me into learning some 3d-modelling, replacing models with my own and messing around with some OpenGL &Ā C++. As that was well above my pay-grade ā and as a huge fan of Newgrounds at the time ā I started decompiling Flash files and learning ActionScript; making my own versions of existing games. This continued for many years and I started attempting to re-create games I loved, such as AoE, C&C, CoD Zombies, and eventually went on to study a Bachelor in Game Design, with a partial scholarship. IĀ bailed before graduation as I had a good opportunity at a startup, and rode that wave for almost 4 years. I learned a hell of a lot and really dialled in my design skills. I did another few years at agencies thereafter, working across a range of roles.
From 2014 - 2018, IĀ ran a supplement manufacturing company called Hapi [formerly Noots], in the cognitive-enhancement field (Nootropics). We were amongst the first to do this in Australia, at the time. It didn't work out and almost broke me, but it was once again an invaluable stepping stone, and a great introduction to the field of science.
My last official role was as the General Manager & Senior Product Designer of SOURCE, a boutique Product Development agency in Melbourne. GM meaning GM-in-training, and GM in training meaning glorified BD-Manager. I grew a lot in this role, exposed and worked on several blindspots, as well as became a bit more mature in the process.
What about now? Well, as of writing, I'm focused on designing and building Webflow sites, on a freelance-basis. IĀ currently manage this ecommerce website, freelance at Superseed Ventures (part of Reece), freelance at Tapestry (ML stuff), and contract for Reground (waste-reduction) occasionally.
I'm also writing a workbook, dubbed the 'Get Your Shit Together Starter Pack', which I've been working on for over two years. I spend a lot of time reading, analysing and summarising studies. Naturally, it's about self-development, but at the same time, it is a parody and critique of the loathsome self-development industry, life-coaches, spiritual-gurus, hustle-culture, pop-influencers and religious-ideology. I've tried to write it in a Hunter S / Chuck Palahniuk / George Carlin style. I sort of describe it as a self-development guide for 20-somethings, laced with satirical-humour and a rock-n-roll flare, to make the dry scientific concepts more approachable and engaging. I am very much writing this for myself. This has been a very rewarding pursuit so far.
And more recently (>mid 2022), as my ADHD-brain reaches novelty-plateaus quite ofter and seeks its new obsession, I've come full circle and started designing a game. Though this is a low-priority right now, the timing feels right. It's going to be a short Psychedelic-Western adventure game, based loosely on the Acid-Western sub-genre, combined with my love for Sergio Leone's Spaghetti-Westerns. I'm particularly motivated by the freedom to create whatever IĀ want ā to create a game I want to play ā without the overbearing restrictions of many large game studios these days; studios who seem more concerned with appealing to as many people as possible while trying to offend nobody, raking in enormous profits from pay-to-play micro-transactions, resulting in games designed by creatively bankrupt MBA-squares, not actual gamers. That's my view, anyway.
To view a full breakdown of my roles and experience over the years, scroll down or click here.
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That's me. š¤
Currently Iām focusing on the social enterprise world. The projects Iām taking on are progressively with NFP's and more conscious private companies.
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Other than contract work, Iām working on an Effective Altruism charity and personal-development tool, to help support various causes to do with reforestation, mental health, animal well being and finding a little purpose amongst the gloom.
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I also have a new found passion for gardening, carpentry and off-grid living! A big project of mine at the moment is becoming fully self-sufficient and reducing my footprint. Lots of digging, which is keeping me fit!
Tech Entrepreneurship Nanodegree
2015 - 2015
Associate Degree: Entrepreneurship &Ā Innovation
2013 - 2014
Bachelor's Degree: Games & Interactivity / Digital Media
2011 - 2013
Diploma: Digital Media
2010 - 2011
Various short-courses inĀ UX/UIĀ Design, HTML/CSS
Below is a timeline of the roles Iāve held. Click the arrows to expand each section, for a little more insight.
Self-employed
Current
I currently work as a freelance designer / contractor, part-time. My focus is on science, health and environmentally-oriented projects that aim to solve real-world problems.
AmongstĀ my design work, IĀ am writing a workbook and designing a game.
I work casually at a local farm and volunteer at two local nurseries, from time-to-time, to get my hands dirty and connect with people IRL.
SOURCEĀ Studio
8 months
At SOURCE Studio, a product development firm in Melbourne, I worked with clients from the first meeting all the way to launch. I would begin by fleshing out their ideas in workshops, architect a product solution and build out the designs, to pass onto the development team once prototyping and usability testing had been done.
I moved up into the General Manager role in the end, to step back from in the trenches UX work and focus on the operational side of the business, building infrastructure and increasing process efficiency etc. An adjacent priority was product management, where I worked with our clients and developers to make sure everything was on track and everyone was happy.
Hapi
~4 years
Back in 2015, after getting sick of tech, I started a little company called Hapi in the Neuroscience field, with a vision of creating personalised cognitive enhancement products; this came out of a passion I had for health and tinkering with the human body.
We raised several rounds of funding and had a team of 8 at one stage, with thousands of customers and steady MoM growth for ~2 years running.
I applied my UX, marketing and industrial design skills to a field that was non-existent in Australia at the time, which helped to get a lot of traction and build a brand that had a really passionate following. Some decent media coverage, too.
I also had to pick many new skills as Hapi was in a field I had not been in before: from manufacturing of supplement products, packing, regulatory compliance, logistics, clinical trial design, wholesale distribution, raising capital, comprehensive financial modelling, basic statistics and many moreā¦ it helped me get a far more rounded skillset.
Although in the end, due to several reasons: namely burnout and lack of passion for what the company became, I stepped back in April 2018 to take time off.
SEEDĀ Digital
12 months
My role at SEED, an app-development company in Melbourne which had a team of over 12, was very much as an all-rounder.
We worked with both early stage startups, well known SME's like Alice McCALL and household names like Kmart in a range of ways.
My main focus was on managing our startup and SME clients, designers and developers. Essentially a glorified SCRUM Master role, ha ha. Albeit, the role turned out to play a very key role in projects running smoothly and successfully.
Other than that, my adjacent focus was on increasing operational efficiency and running CRO experiments on client websites to increase sales.
JTBĀ Studios
~12 months
After my first startup experience, I wanted to see what the agency world was like and worked at a full-service studio called JTB, in Footscray, for just shy of a year.
This role was more traditional and had a pretty specific focus on Account Management. I got to work with several large brands that I had not had exposure to before, such as Nissan and Fairfax, as well as many other SMEs that have been around for a long time.
Toward the end I pioneered and introduced a Conversion Optimisation service that helped the company generate more ongoing profit from existing clients, based on a monthly subscription service.
Alas, the toxic culture was not for me.
BreakThrough Apps
3.5 years
In the final semester of my degree I decided to drop-in on what would turn out to be the experience of a lifetime, at a product development startup creating mobile-apps at the height of the āapp-boomā.
At BreakThrough, I originally got offered a role as a Video Production contractor, creating commercials for the apps they were building.
After a year, I moved into a Junior Designer position, making all the app interfaces look pretty. At the time, a new CTO from the UK came on board who had a deep background in UX. He helped me develop my UX, prototyping and design thinking skills massively which eventually led to me moving into a UX / Product Management role.
The fruit of this new earned labor was designing a Job Safety Analysis (JSA) app for construction workers, which was recently acquired by SafetyTech.
This, like my experience running Hapi, was intense but helped me to pick up a wide range of skills and develop as a person.
Freelance
~3 years
From year 9 in High School I began to develop a real love for games and animation. This got me obsessed with Adobe Flash and ActionScript, which led me into game design tools such as Game Maker, Unity and Unreal Engine.
As an avid RTS & FPS fan, I was hell bent on re-creating my own versions of Age of Empires and Zombies from Call of Duty ā the latter of which I was able to achieve to some degree. This early passion was a gateway into web design and video production.
I loved creating animations and expressing ideas in video format, as itās a format which is very compelling. In recent times, I've began to rediscover this passion.
Between these years I was very much working on my own projects, building up my skills and doing small freelance gigs for people here and there.
