About
Me, Myself and I
If you hadn't guessed, my name is Joe Angus and I am a webdeveloper by trade. I'll give you a short introduction to who I am, and how I came about doing what I do. I'm born and raised in Kent, in the South East of England. From a very early age (due to growing up with a father and uncle running their own hardware and software development company) I had access to a computer.
Although bought up from quite a technical background, I've always had a flair for design and creativity. With my father working primarily for the pre-print industry, I saw a lot of magazine designers at work, big imagesetters printing out on film, platesetters and all kinds of big expensive equipment used to produce all stages of the print process 
I soon discovered Photoshop (version 3 back then!), and for many hours used to sit and play with all the different tools at my disposal. Obviously being quite young, the crazy randomised results from using filters used to be quite a popular one, but it didn't take long before I was using the real core fundamental tools to produce results. From photomanipulation, to creating skins for 3D models on modifcation development teams, it seemed to be endless.
I also really enjoyed drawing in school, and used Photoshop a lot to produce digital drawings. I eventually bought myself a Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet, and use that frequently in all kinds of my design work. I spent some of my free time doing digital paintings, which can be seen on my portfolio. I frequently read the CG talk forums, which produce some of the most amasing artists ive ever seen, although I don't feel like I can ever be that good, as it's just a hobby, I thoroughly enjoy sitting down and painting whatever I see fit.
When I was 10, my father bought me my first HTML book... I remember, it was huge! and however sad it sounds - I used to carry it around with me every where, intrigued by all of the things you could do. I created my own website which was full of Javascript effects, and all sorts of what's now inaccessible markup. Notepad was my most loved tool, and when the first Frontpage WYSIWYG editor was released, although it saved some time (initially so I thought), I was very quick to discover the flaws and 'newbieness' of it. I soon fell in love with web design, I spent weeks upon weeks modifying and learning new techniques to use. Obviously it was a giant mess, and visually although I thought back then was really attractive, probably would be largely frowned upon at present.
I stuck to it, moved on to some applications like Macromedia Director, and then Macromedia Flash - learning the in's and out's before using it effectively where nescessary. As I got older, I started building up quite a knowledge base, and an adaquete skill set in design packages. From the age of 15, I was designing for a company called 2Tone Developement, which later turned into CIS Partnership - experience was my key aim, and CIS put me three steps forward.
Then, I realized how much power PHP with mySQL had - and once again a massive flair from inside of me lit up, although this time from a technical angle. I worked for 2months for work experience at my Uncle's software development company Workflow Solutions, watching intentively and helping solve problems. I learnt an immense amount, and came away confident to increase my knowledge and push myself to achieve some much more needed level's of design and development.
Jumping in the deep end maybe, I started a project View-5 with my best friend Chris Gardner. Chris designed the entire project, and I was left to code a complete backend from the ground up. View-5's objective was to be a kind of Myspace/Deviant Art hybrid, for digital artists alike. Although it wasn't completely sucessful in popularity, it flaired a lot of interest from a leading design magazine Computer Arts, who were supposedly going to feature us, yet never quite got around to it. Anyway, I completeled my first backend, member's could sign up - upload their art (from various categories), they could all comment on each other's artwork, post private messages, rate other's artwork... and the list goes on. Seeing the first 30 people register and use the system, just let us know that it was 8 months well spent!
After working freelance for around 2years, building up a portfolio and clientbase, I decided it was time to go into a commercial environment e.g I didn't want to work from home anymore, and I didn't want to not know how much Id be taking home at the end of the month - so I applied for a job, which I still have to present. I work as a fulltime web developer and designer for a local company called Tinderhouse Ltd
