About

I have nine years front-end web design / front-end development experience, working for companies such as play.com, firebox.com and headshift.com prior to going freelance in July 2007. My work has embraced everything from initial wireframes and interface/interaction design through to graphic design and frontend (X)HTML/CSS/jQuery development, always with a focus on usability and standards-compliant, accessible markup.

Recently I have been increasingly using the combination of WordPress as lightweight CMS and the jQuery JavaScript library to unobtrusively add rich functionality, which allows me to develop relatively sophisticated and full-featured sites more rapidly and inexpensively.

If you think you would like to hire me, ask a question, or just say hi, please visit the Contact page. Otherwise, read on for more details…

I’ve been freelance since last July and in that time have done a fairly varied set of websites:

http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/

Redesign of Museum of London website. All front-end coding and some design work (in collaboration with Ronny Ellefsen at tape London). Working with Ronny I also recently developed a Drupal themeing system for blogs on the Victoria and Albert Museum website (www.vam.ac.uk), but this has yet to go live.

http://www.crowdstorm.com/

I was contracted to redesign the site and did all front-end design and build. This is quite a good example of use of jQuery for some interface effects etc. The site recently won a WebUser Gold award.


For Ciaron Dunne at www.outplaymedia.co.uk:


http://www.letterland.com/

I was responsible for all front-end coding, this time working from designs supplied from a third party.

Also for Ciaron:

http://www.lumie.com/

Once more, I did all front-end coding, working on designs supplied.

The following projects completed in the last year are all WordPress customisations and again I did all design/coding:


I recently redesigned the online learning section of the Museum of London website (current site: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/Learning/Learningonline/default.htm), with a brief to increase accessibility, improve information architecture, and move to standards-compliant, semantic markup. This site is not live yet but you can see some pages here:


This project was also in conjunction with tape (http://www.tapelondon.co.uk/) with whom I’ve worked on a number of museum website  projects for the V&A, Museum of London, and Museum of Childhood. I’m sure Ronny Ellefsen at tape would be happy to give a reference (ronny@tapelondon.co.uk)

Prior to going freelance I worked for two years at www.headshift.com, which is the UK’s leading social software consultancy, working on a diverse range of projects (usually featuring some sort of blog/wiki integration) for clients including Allen & Overy, Amnesty UK, BBC, BP, Demos, NHS, The Saatchi Gallery and more. Although many of these were private intranets or prototyping projects and thus not publicly available a few can be seen:


I also redesigned the bbc backstage site while at headshift, but it hasn’t gone live yet. Just thought I’d mention it, though.

bbcbackstage_1bbcbackstage_2

I remain very interested in the whole social software thing, so if you feel like cyberstalking me you can find me here:


Prior to headshift I was lead designer at www.firebox.com for two years but I didn’t do much actual designing there as my role was mainly putting new stuff on the site. To allay the crushing boredom I initiated the Firebox Film Festival which was lots of fun and shows how terribly proactive and self-starting I am.

Before that I spent two and a half years as lead designer for www.play.com.  I joined the company when it was 10 people and designed and built the front-end for the site which is still substantially unchanged today, at least in terms of IA/interface design.  I also came up with the current logo and ‘brand identity’. Play.com is now the third largest eCommerce site in Europe so I am quite proud of my work there.

Although my focus is front-end development and interface design I have had quite extensive experience with liaising with developers and integrating designs into various backend systems  (most commonly PHP/MySQL, but also ColdFusion, ASP, ASP.NET). I used to do quite a lot of Flash work at play.com including interactive adverts and banners etc, but haven’t really done any Flash in the last few years, so can’t help you there, Flash fans. I’m pretty good on jQuery though if you like whistles and bells on your interface.

As you can see I have fairly extensive experience in designing complex web applications in addition to smaller sites.

If you’d like to get in touch to discuss a project, please use the Contact page, or call me on 07810 502628 or 01223 510823. Alternatively, you can usually find me at twitter.com/rikabel.