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About

My name’s Matthew Hill and I am a freelance web designer. I grew up in the seaside resort of Brighton in England and lived and worked there for nearly 35 years until moving to London in June 2007.

I've worked in the digitial media industry since 1990. I started in desk top publishing, producing training materials for American Express. Since then, my career has moved through multimedia production of CD-ROMs, eLearning design & delivery right up to modern web design and development.

Most of my early career was spent working as a multimedia author for Maxim Training, a management skills training company (now defunct). I mainly developed eLearning CD-ROMs using the Macromedia tool, Authorware. Around 1997 with the Web slowly taking off, the company started to move to browser-based delivery of courses and I learned HTML.

Since then, I have switched completely from eLearning and I now focus solely on web design and development. My current focus is the design of accessible, standards-compliant websites that follow current best practice and are usable by as many people on as many devices as possible. I now have a wide variety of skills including:

  • Hand coding XHTML & CSS layouts to the highest standards of accessibility
  • Graphic design of web interfaces
  • Consultancy on web accessibility

I have a working knowledge of back-end programming, but that's too geeky for me so I generally leave it alone. I can produce illustrative graphics and am very experienced at photo manipulation. I also have experience of print design and have worked in publishing departments for large multinationals.

Outside of work, a bit of a film nut and I love nothing better than going to an old, dark picture house to catch the latest art-house film or summer blockbuster. I'm interested in ancient civilisations, art, photography, literature, computer games, comedy and environmental issues. I'm not too keen on charity muggers, eating anything that looks like the same dead as alive, and the modern obsession with the celebration of mediocrity.

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