About
Hello. I'm Simon Kitson, a web designer living in Leicester, England. I've been working in this new-fangled digital media
industry since 2001 with a particular focus on web design. I suppose I'm what you could call a standardista, someone who evangelises about web-standards and web accessibility, and I'll quite happily yap away for hours on either topic should you ask.
Professional Experience
At present I am working full-time as a web designer at Fuse Digital in Leicester, where I have been working on projects with Lucozade, Carlsberg, Quorn and Fruit of the Loom, among others.
Previously I have plied my trade at various digital agencies in the Midlands, as well as a brief stint working freelance full-time. I lived and worked in Finland for almost 4 years where I had the opportunity to work on digital projects with Nokia Mobile Phones alongside a great bunch of people.
I specialise in web design and front-end build, but have been known to dabble with Flash, Javascript and PHP.
Personal Bits
I am now the grand old age of 28 which makes it 10 years since I went to study Interactive Media at the University of Huddersfield. At the time, Huddersfield was one of only a handful of Universities in the country to offer a degree of this kind.
Generally I'm an amiable fellow who tends to get along with everyone. I like cars (Alfa-Romeos especially), science-fiction and listening to my music while I work. I like going for a beer with mates, anything with an interesting design and Apple Macs.
I live in the city of Leicester, England, but my heart is in Finland. Great place, great people. I also enjoy travelling. I aim to see as much of the World as possible before I die.
Links
- Photo gallery of good friend Stuart Ball, cheeky chappy extraordinaire.
- Northbound, Stuart and Ama's creative agency.
- Mr Marco Pajari's excellent advertising agency Daddy Finland. Who's your daddy?
- Random interesting-ness penned by web design guy Steve Tucker.
- Cameron Moll's blog Authentic Boredom. Inspiration and envy in equal measure.
- FamFamFam. Creator of the nice little icons that litter this website.
- Mr Dave Straker's superlative Changing Minds resource. How we change what others think, believe, feel and do.
Me, Elsewhere
Kitsimons.com...
...has been featured on.
Software Pimp
Touting tools of the trade.
Mac OS X. Oh yes, I worship at the apple-shaped altar. You too can seek enlightenment.
skEdit. There are more fully-featured HTML/CSS editors out there (such as the wonderful Coda), but you can't beat the sheer simplicity of skEdit. That it shares my initials is purely coincidence.
Transmit. The best FTP-client for Mac by a long stretch. The best FTP-client on any platform in my humble opinion (yes, I have to edure the awful Cute FTP at the day job).
Parallels Desktop. Top-notch virtual machine for OS X. Perfect for testing websites in those pesky Internet Explorer browsers. Both IE6 and IE7 at the same time. Nice.
Firefox. Not as pretty nor as quick as Safari, but is my web browser of choice for two reasons: plug-ins and the excellent Gecko rendering engine.
Textpattern. Simple, flexible and not to mention free website content management system.
Photoshop. There's no two ways about it, the juggernaut that is Adobe's Photoshop still rules the roost when it comes to graphics editing. In spite of CS3 having crap icons.
Paparazzi. This priceless little app will grab screenshots of web pages, saving countless hours of stitching images together.
