Thanks for visiting my folio website.

I have assembled here a broad range of work from the last 20 years of my career to give you an idea my skills and experience.

I originally trained as an Industrial Designer at Prahran College of Advanced Education in inner southern Melbourne in the late 1970s. My work as a product, retail and exhibition designer for national and international companies in the 1980s and early 1990s helped me build my skills.

I use design to communicate an idea, a message or an invitation to engage, using the most appropriate media for the task at hand. I have creative and utilitarian design skills and experience in graphic design, traditional and digital print production, marketing and web application user interface design.

Five years after graduation I started up my own small but successful graphic design and exhibition and display business, Clearidea Design. For eight years I worked on over 1000 diverse projects from simple local press advertising campaigns that lasted a month, through export development marketing and display projects that lasted six months, to integrated brand, marketing and communication consultancies that lasted many years.

In that time I moved in step with technological change. I started in an industry that worked with pen and paper and photographic dark rooms and took months to create and deliver a campaign. I now work in an industry that has embraced the computer to cut design and production lead times significantly allowing me to become more flexible and creative.

I bought my first Apple Macintosh desktop publishing system in 1986 and in 1991 my company Clearidea Design was one of the first design consultancies in Melbourne to move to full digital workflow with an in-house digital image-setter and short-run laser printers.

My interest in the technical production side of the business saw me closing the design business and moving to manage digital artwork production for a major design house in Melbourne.

In 1995 I was given the opportunity to teach these skills full time at Swinburne University of Technology. There I ran the computer graphics teaching curriculums for the Graphic Art, Graphic Design and Electronic Design and Interactive Media TAFE courses for five years. During this stint as a teacher I started looking at the computer as a more artistic tool.

In 2000 I moved into the dot com boom and joined Pacific Access (now Sensis), as a Producer for Telstra's WAP Search, the largest WAP application implementation in the world at that time.

From there I moved into web delivered information and on-line applications design for major international computer hardware and telecommunications companies, working with products that targeted multiple delivery platforms from large desktop computers to mobile phones.

Although based in Melbourne, my work designing user interfaces for web-based application management portals also took me to the Philippines and Singapore to help launch products and train staff to use web-based products that I had helped design.

My experience with on-line application design lead me to Canberra where I worked with an IT company on the user interface design for the Central Budget Management System for the Department of Finance and Administration.

I continued on in Canberra as a user interface designer, technical writer, graphic designer and marketing creative, both as a freelance designer and then as a full-time employee.

After a short stint during the global financial crisis with an international digital web development agency, I went to work for one of the largest Australian Government departments to help build a new web-delivered biographical data collection application. I was originally contracted to design the application's user interface, but this role expanded to include also working on the front-end coding as part of the production team.

In recent years I've worked on a number of large enterprise-level web-based applications that are now used across the whole of government in Australia.

My main interests are in working on complex projects that need my information architecture, user interface and user interaction design skills.

I’m currently a freelance user interface designer and graphic designer in Canberra, ACT, Australia but work throughout Australia and Asia.

Contact me today and let's start a conversation in design.

You can also download a copy of the complete website content here for offline reference:

stephenwho_folio_092010.pdf

Click here to request my Resume.