My portfolio web site McCoy.co.uk is coming up for its ten years anniversary and I felt it would be interesting( for me at least) to look back at how I have developed my career as a web designer along side the web’s development. Maybe if I have a flash of inspiration I may get to hypothesis where we will both be in the future, and if we will both continue to make a living together.

Its a hopefully comic tale of near misses and mistakes with a few lucky breaks.

I will start at the beginning as its always a safe place to start and hope fully fill in the years as and when I feel inspired enough to attempt to write.

Sure it all started much earlier than I am documenting as a small boy with a ZX Spectrum and acne but everyone goes on about that stuff and its all a bit irrelevant, and could really have gone anywhere & nowhere.

1995 - First proper PC and a sniff of the internet

I was discovered as being dyslexic towards he end of my degree in Fine Art at what is now know as the University of Gloucestershire in Cheltenham but we just referred to it as Nam. I had always been good at hiding my guilty learning disability secret thought my schooling, by using a mixture of quick wits & a shy, bellow the radar way of carrying myself, or so I though. The upshot was that along with the diagnosis came a grant of £3.500 pounds towards getting a PC to help with my studies. This grant took me too a small industrial unit in Evesham to purchase one of Evesham Micros earliest PC’s with a staggering 8 meg of memory. I was not content with just using the computer for essay writing and started using the machine to do other things in connection with my art degree, exciting things, pretty things with colour’s and sound and pixels.

It was whilst walking down the corridor of the art college in Cheltenham with my philosophy lecturer and chatting about nothingness and all that fluent malarkey that you really need crazy hair and a penchant for black clothing that I sported so much in those days, that I first was introduced to the concept of the internet. The conversation revolved the fact that you could order books from the Amazon, this confused me as I tried to get my head both around the concept that I could purchase books via my computer from a book shop in another continent, and why the hell was it called The Amazon, what did that have to do with anything? This made no sense to me at all! Never the less I wanted to know more, and figured that it could be a very interesting tool in my creative expression…

I graduated from University with a 2:1 degree in Fine Art and decided that I wanted to work in film so I moved to London with a few friends and set about printing of my CV and sending it to all the film companies I could find the details of in books. No internet sites to research companies on in those days and I wouldn’t have been able to afford an internet connection then anyway, certainly not in the flat we where living in. Had no luck at all getting work. Started making lofi music using the speech synthesizer on my PC and a selection of home made lofi electronic instruments such as guitars made from old speakers and crazy tape deck with the reading heads taken out and placed in hand units. The result was odd noisy and somewhat inspirational to me and I still have some of the tapes I recorded.

1996 - Getting tired of the smoke, moving up north and my first web site

Got sick of London, not getting a job despite working tirelessly on it and the people I was living with and their odd personal politics and moved back to very rural Worcestershire. I then spotted an advert in the Guardian Newspaper, for a place in Liverpool called the Merseyside Innovation Center, who where offering postgraduate courses in Business Management with a work placement, all that and an extra £10 a week on top of my unemployment benefit. I liked the sound of that, not just for the extra record tokens but also because I loved Liverpool, and because I realised I had a great set of creative and philosophical skills but no complimentary business skills. I got a place on the course and found my self surrounded with accountancy graduates by day and sat in a freezing flat with holes in the windows in one of the roughest areas of Anfield in Liverpool. The first night I moved in youths set light to the back gate. Still the course was worthwhile and I learnt lost of businessy stuff, but it was the work placement that was really the catalyst of things.

I landed a work placement at Lion Rock Multimedia ltd. Lion Rock was a husband and wife team that operated out of the old mine buildings in Saint Helens / Warrington.We produced CD Roms of at the time high quality clip art and information resources. These products started to use connections to resources on the web and formed my first programming experience as I was responsible as lead creative for building the User Interfaces with Authorware. Authorware was I suppose a pre curser to Flash and Director. My other duties where to produce a lot of the clip art and most notably “Clip Victoriana” a CD of Victorian style illustrations. It also fell on my to design the companies first web site. This web site I built with Netscape Gold, an extension to the only really know browser at the time. And the web site was horrendous, full of scanned rocks for buttons and other found objects, it was huge in file size for those days, but it was a web site none the less.

Whilst I was at Lion Rock I started tinkering with doing my own work and the first version of Hydromel (now known as My Pepper Soul) was born.

The job didn’t last as events got weirder and weirder when stolen condom machines started turning up at the office and a wonky old caravan was rolled up along side the office and called the meeting room. The first meeting that was held in it was between the MD of he company and the bank manager, it was an entertaining site to see the stern bank manager come hurtling out the caravan as it collapsed to one side due to the rusty supports snapping, to be followed by the ever comically formed MD, with his teeth stuck in with blue tack stolen from behind the health and safety poster. I left, walked out vacated the premises not long after the collapsing meeting room event and spent the next year back on unemployment benefit and working voluntary, more on that later…

1997 - 3 voluntary jobs no pay then the first proper job

After trying in vain to explain to the job centers in Liverpool what a multimedia designer was and getting nowhere I volunteered to help out at FACT (the Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology) on the biannual Video Positive exhibition, I wasn’t getting paid, but figured it was getting me out of the house, I was learning new skills and the lunch allowance was quite generous. I did a host of menial duties for them over the time I was their like photo copying, stuffing envelopes, painting walls, data de duping but I also got to do a fair bit of video editing, setting up electronic arts shows and looking after a show at the night club Cream. Its a weird experience being at a nightclub on your own for hours at a time with no one around. On one of the days I was there a group of kids came in with a teacher from Artskills. I got speaking to them and discovered that they helped out kids from the more troubled areas of Merseyside by teaching them creative skills including Photoshop so I volunteered for them too and built my second commercial web site for them as part of their Drugspotting project. 2 jobs and no pay, but I was out and I was learning and building a CV. As if that was not enough I also started a course in Entertainment and Performance Technology, which was really a posh name for theatre and live music lighting design and sound engineering.

Whilst at FACT I bumped into the team at a web design company Amaze during the time a young Daniel Brown creator of the seminal Noodlebox web site was their. I was initially talking to them about using my hand made guitars to create a sound scape for one of their projects and have spoken to them over many years with a view to freelancing for them but it never seams to have happened.

Artskills had come to the end of their term and Video Positive was pretty much done, so I had time on my hands and found a course in Visual Basic at Kalamazoo and interviewed for an MA in Multimedia Design and Development at Liverpool University. Whilst at Kalamazoo they offered me a work placement at a then tiny web agency operating out of an even tinnier room on the London road behind the train station. I took the placement and worked with the guys for a little time. Discussions came about regarding me setting up a side company to supply the design resource to their business and build resource, but then I landed a proper paying job. The job was as the designer for a new web site that was being set up by the Liverpool Echo & Daily Post and was to be called Liverpool.com I took the job mainly because I was going to get paid for something for a change but I must admit that the fact that the Web Shed boys would only play U2 & Christian rock in the office was a large contributing factor.

Liverpool.com was a baptism of fire, I was for a long tim the only production resource for a HUGE web site updated daily with news, sport, forums & special features in a time before databases and I had to maintain and monitor the site with nothing more then a PC, a copy of textpad and a copy of photoshop. It was murder… I wasn’t helped that my desk was stuck in the middle of the IT department and I do mean in the middle.