I trained as a designer — BSc Digital Media, First Class — and I never actually stopped. Fourteen brand and print projects for clients around Dorset and Bristol, all of them done between 2022 and now, alongside the platform work rather than before it.
They vary enormously in size. Some are a full identity with signage and print; Hubery was a single logo; Wingbits was a product shoot. One of them, Sam's Garage, is motion and visual effects rather than print at all.
Print decides things
Screens are forgiving. You can ship, notice the kerning is wrong, and fix it before most people load the page. Print does not work like that. At the moment you send the file, every decision becomes permanent and expensive, multiplied by however many thousand you ordered.
That does something useful to how you work. You check. You print a proof and look at it under real light, because a colour that looked right on a calibrated monitor can be wrong on uncoated stock. You learn that a spread has a gutter and that putting anything important near it is a mistake you make exactly once.
It is the same instinct behind testing a restore rather than assuming a backup, and rehearsing a deploy rather than trusting that staging matches production. Irreversible things deserve more care than reversible ones — print teaches that faster than software does, because the invoice arrives either way.
Objects, not just pages
The archive is full of things you can hold: trifold brochures photographed open with the paper curling, a vinyl sleeve half out of its jacket, a stationery stack on oak, roll-up banners standing in a room. I think about work as objects in the world at least as much as pixels, which is unusual for someone who now spends most of their time in a terminal.
The Altered Carbon brochure system shown here is the most developed of them — a technical company explaining graphene sensing to people who need to understand it without a physics degree, which is the same explanatory problem as the documentation work, just on paper.
Why it is still here
I could reasonably drop this section. Most engineers would, and most would present it as a former life if they kept it.
It stays, in the present tense, because it is the honest answer to why I build things the way I do. The reason I care whether a dashboard is legible, whether a chart lies, whether the type on a van matches the type on the invoice — that is not a phase I grew out of. It is running concurrently.