Harnessing my strong communication skills and ability to understand and work with others is what leads to my best project outcomes. I constantly seek the bigger picture when planning and conceptualising an idea, and use my work as an opportunity to connect with people from different contexts. This passion has been fed by arts, crafts, and scrapbooking with my mum as a little boy, where I discovered the world of visual communication. Growing up, I would spend all of my spare time outside mucking around on farms, exploring beaches or the hills, which is where my love for the outdoors developed. I have a positive, hard working attitude, but always make time for fun, such as surfing or rock climbing.
I'm a graphic designer and outdoor enthusiast, born and raised in Ōtepoti Dunedin, New Zealand. In 2023 I graduated with a Bachelor of Design (Communication) from the School of Design at Otago Polytechnic. I previously studied graphic design over three years in secondary education. I have a wide range of skills and experience, but like to specialize in projects involving people, typography, and printed media.
The changing world around me and communities that coincide with this have, and will continue to have, a great deal of influence on my personal design aesthetic. When approaching a brief, I typically begin by connecting and communicating with the client to attempt to truly understand their context, ideas, and story, before working with them toward the best solution. This approach tends to lead to much more specialized outcomes, where my personal aesthetic adapts to the brief.
I also take a lot of inspiration from everyday things that pop out at me, such as architecture, nature, and of course other graphic design work. A common factor that defines my personal aesthetic throughout these different genres would be a focus on contrast (weight, colour, shape), harmony, and visual hierarchy. I believe that these factors are enable effective communication when used well.
I have a passion for people, which has given me the ability to easily connect with diverse individuals, communities and cultures in order to work interdependently with them on projects, big and small. I am currently working with the wider Dunedin climbing community to collate a new rock climbing guide of current climbing knowledge, including climbing history, cultural history, and scientific information related to Dunedin and New Zealand. For this project, instead of taking creative charge, I am managing skilled teams, and encouraging them to use their skill sets to generate a modern narrative of the Dunedin climbing network. By involving several stakeholders in the design process, the guide will be more of a honest reflection of the Dunedin climbing scene that has formed in the wake of the previous guidebook - rather than being my personal (and probably bias) reflection of the local network.
This ethos has also played an important part in my most recent successful project, a poetry book called Mountain Dreaming. Mountain Dreaming is a collection of poetry inspired by mountains, but also by life and its conundrums and its unanswered questions. The poems were written by Peter Strang, a veteran New Zealand climber, over many years spent in and around high places in Aotearoa and also further abroad. I approached Peter after hearing him read some of these poems at a New Zealand Alpine Club monthly meeting, and over the period of a year, I collated these poems and designed this publication as well as the surrounding content - to get these fantastic poems seen by a wider audience. The book printing was paid for through the local section of the New Zealand Alpine Club and after paying them back, all sales money from the 200 copies sold, as well as hand printed T-shirts, and posters ($1200) was donated to a Kiwi climbing charity called the Tūpiki Trust, who support a huge variety of New Zealand-based outdoor activities.
As well as book and print design, I also enjoy designing packaging, logos, posters, music related content, and I have a strong interest in photography, cinematography and video editing. I have developed experience in these disciplines through many hours of practice and experimentation, working alongside other creatives, local bands, fashion designers, clubs, and through class projects, to name a few.
Aside from my design practice, I am also a ski instructor, and have worked three seasons in both Aotearoa and Japan, which I will likely continue to do again (skiing is an addiction of mine). Outside of the studio, you might also find me at the beach surfing, rock climbing at one of the local crags, skateboarding around town or off in the hills searching for some bigger rocks or ice to climb!