Career
I am fortunate to have been exposed to a number of different environments which has allowed me maximum personal growth.
Career summary
Studies - Graduated in Industrial Design
Advertising photography - Product photography
Advertising creative - Printed colour creative for magazine
Storyboard artist - Cannon Films/Golan Globus
Pentagaph Design - Industrial Designer
Communication Consultants - Head of Design
Ray Moore Design - Product development and consultant
Webwizard - Owner website development
Web Sports Ventures - Partner website development & management
SuperSport - Head of New Media
Design, technology & photography
Every space is different. Every object has its unique reason for existing.
A person may produce a thousand ideas before arriving at the perfect one. It's a necessary part of the creative process.
Find out what your true passions really are
Look for unique ways of doing things
Create a plan based on goals and objectives
Think carefully about your final product
- Constantly evaluate the progress and make appropriate decisions
- Don't fear failure, learn from it
More about me
Sport
Sport is a wonderful way of creating finite goals which one can strive to achieve. My father had a tremendous focus on endurance events, so I went along with his focus. I have never been a person who can only have a single interest which represents the diversity of the sports in which I participated. In summary some of the endurance highlights were:
1 x Comrades Marathon: 9h 50 (92.4km in 1982)
1 x Duzi 3 day canoe marathon10 x Argus Cycle Tours
3 x Mount Kilimanjaro treks1 x Everest base camp trek
3 x Midmar Mile swimming events
On top of these highlights there were hundreds of cycling events and around 80 long distance running events.
Golf
Golf to me is all about the experience and the people you play with. You learn so much about people when you play golf with them. It brings out their true self in the way that they deal with both success and challenges in their golf
My favourite golf courses played on the 7 continents would be as follows:
America: Pebble Beach, Augusta, TPC Sawgrass
England: Wentworth
Scotland: Carnoustie, Prestwick, St Andrews
Ireland: Old Head, Cork GC
China: Mission Hills GC, World Cup course
Australia: New South Wales GC
Argentina: Campo de Golf de La Ciudad
South Africa: Pezula, Pearl Valley
Technology
In 1986 the computer bug bit me on two platforms, my friend Mark’s Apple 2E and my father’s Panda XT 286. Soon I was completely engrossed in them be it on the games on the Apple and the basic functionality of the XT. I was in South African National military service for two years as a photographer, but when I joined Pentagraph Design in 1988 it was my first real in-depth experience of computing. On the one hand they had a mainframe Skok CAD system which I learnt at night almost every night, as well as the first commercial Apple systems running Quark Express in the design environment. I simply knew that a new world was beginning and I had to be part of it.
When I left Pentagraph to join Communication Consultants late in 1989, I took the leap of faith and personally bought a 386 SX “IBM compatible” PC with 2 MB of Ram – the absolute top of the range. I needed to buy Windows 286 so I could run Corel Draw on the system, amazingly the only reason I needed it. It cost me around R12 000 which at the time was a massive loan which I took from the bank. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do with the PC but I simply knew I had to have it. I few Corporate Identity designs later in my part time and the PC was quickly paid off. My experience of the Skok system made the migration to the early versions of AutoCad very simple.
Design
Purity of design is such an important component of any visual product. People often have the incorrect view of design on the world. It is often seen as the purely the aesthetics used for marketing, something that annoys the numerous fields of design worldwide. EntrepreneurTo be an entrepreneur is to look for opportunity in an environment. It may be on a complex financial involvement or a simple small value cash product. It’s about trying to initiate product or service as an individual to take advantage of conditions. I was fortunate to have realised that the Internet was something which I had to be involved with. I was not sure how or why, but I knew it was going to be something big which was going to have strong commercial components to it.
In the early confusing days of the Internet, with no real browser directories, it was difficult to understand how advanced it would be come in short space of time. There was massive confusion of what it was and very quickly there was a lot of distrust regards the Internet. My first ever commercial revenue receiving transaction was for a trekking list to climb Mount Kilimanjaro. I requested that the browsers posted their payment by normal after receiving the detailed information. Believe it or not they did! The day I received the first payment from somebody in Kansas, I knew that there was massive opportunity for revenue as a small player on the Internet. Suddenly the world was the one’s market!
Lateral thinking
People think that creativity is mainly about visual elements, however it is much more than that. I’d align lateral thinking very close to creativity because it is all about exploring new ways of seeing something. It may be how to solve something as simple as preventing an electronic component from getting wet, or a new way of structuring a financial product in a way nobody had thought of. The basis of lateral thinking is about not being afraid of think about completely “left field” concepts even if 99% really seem ridiculous or simply stupid. Sometimes, amazingly enough, the absolutely obvious is often neglected for some reason. It is often the art of seeing the obvious which is important, instead of repeating the existing.
Travel
My childhood was spent growing up in 4 countries on two continents so travelling has always been part of my life. I actually think that contrary to popular belief, the disruption allows a person to grow up being more adaptable rather than feeling insecure. As an example, going to a purely French school in Nouakchott in Mauritania among vast expanses of the Sahara desert, was very exciting having just come from living in London. It was Mount Kilimanjaro which then started the international journey again, with the summit providing both strong physical and emotional experiences. A week on the pristine white beaches of Zanzibar after the first summit made me realise that there was a whole world that needed exploring.
After looking from the highest point in Africa meant that there was an urge to go higher, so after two trips to Kilimanjaro we were off to Singapore and then Nepal for the Trek to Everest base camp. Meeting people from a Buddhist culture made me realise just how diverse the world was. Kathmandu was a melting pot of cultures so diverse it made me realise how little I knew about the world. I knew I needed to explore, to meet people from all corners of the globe. Right there and then and knew I wanted to visit all 7 continents of the Earth, something which became a little bit of an obsession. I had already seen a bit of Western Europe as well as Africa, but the Far east made me realise just how secluded I had been. Multiple trips to China and Thailand, still two of my favorite countries made me wish to spend more and more time there, but there was more to see.
The Himalayas were definitely some of the most amazing scenes I have ever seen. Watching the sun rise over an expanse of summits is simply breathtaking. My final continent was unsurprisingly Antarctica, which visited with with wife Jane. It is simply impossible to explain a trip to a continent which is so uninhabited and untouched in most ways. It is fascinating to watch the scenery and wildlife which is so diverse and different to anywhere else. It was surreal to be so amazed about a world which is so unknown to most. The education we received on the ship from academics explaining about the ice, the climate, the wildlife and the history made me realise how little we really know about this precious world of ours.