Welcome, plucky new designer and prospective portfolio owner to the Wild Wild Web (so wild, it has to be said twice). It’s an information-dense frontier where everyone and their horse is trying to fleece you for your time and/or hard earned gold - especially if you’re trying to set up a new digital homestead. But wait! Some savvy varmints know how to survive in this wilderness with a website costing next to nothing. You too can join them for less than a bottle of the finest sarsaparilla. Interested? Read on…

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It can be a pain to choose a good brand name, especially one that reflects you as a person. Chosen for its laconic nature, I encountered nkgpt by accident…

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I’m not going to lie: I’m an attention seeker and I crave it! There’s a caveat though in that the attention being sought should be derived from a platform that disconnects me from the content as an immediate person – no selfies, no podcasts and certainly no videos. Although excluding these auxiliary media is difficult in achieving successful attention-grabbing content, I firmly believe the only medium that really allows for the purest of ideas to flow is the occlusive format of writing, and this is due to a few factors…

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I’m always in awe of people who shift themselves from their well established comfort zones and settle into a new place. Moving countries accentuates the challenge this brings by immersing the candidate in a plethora of habit-relearning challenges. As a universal philosophy, a stranger, especially a foreign one who is perceived as being good is more welcome than one perceived with any form of negativity - this can be observed the world over. Whether you’re representing your country, your company or any other reputation-based commodity, it pays dividends to conduct yourself in a positive light at all times.

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Brainstorming is inefficient… that is brainstorming in a group, which happens to be the original definition but is often liberally applied to solo ideation as well. My impetus for writing this article was inspired by countless futile experiences to harness the value of multiple minds in a team and also a recent reading of an excellent Harvard Business Review article by UCL Business Psychology professor Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic.

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I thought I’d put my sticky note addiction to good use by creating this guide for beginner UXers.

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Development chaos, slick presentations and an excess of thick and crusty American-style pizzas; these are the things I remember the most when I look back at my first hackathon. This maiden voyage into uncharted space became even more memorable when the application we strived towards for 24 hours didn’t turn out the way we’d expected – the nature of all projects I suppose, but there was definitely an element of naivety at play…

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It’s intriguing how successful non-traditional education systems can be. I liberally place General Assembly into this category knowing full well that they have teachers with classrooms, borrowing heavily from the classic model of “listen and do” schooling. However, when I embarked on their 10-week UX Design immersive programme (UXDi) I was happily surprised to find it offered more beyond the core knowledge base around UX that could put me ahead of the competition in the real world.

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This was a practical exercise in speeding-up my Photoshop skills whilst defacing the most parodied work of classical art in the world with a British-spin.

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Today, by sheer accident (and with a little encouragement from Youtube Suggestions), I stumbled upon an old PC game which, fifteen odd years ago, I really wanted to own the full version of yet could only ever have the pleasure (and pain) of indulging in its demo.

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