After 12 months of slowly going blind with a light-box shining into my face 24/7, my fingers sticky with cow-gum and constantly moving from darkness to light as we exposed negatives and prepared metal plates ready for the press, my boss walked in and laid a box carefully on the table. "You're young, you'll work it out in no time" he said and revealed a shiny Macintosh 'Plus' and a bunch of cables…

After a lot of sweating and swearing, I got it rigged up and the world of digital publishing and illustration was opened up to me!

Fast forward a couple of years and I decided to up my skills game by going to college to get some design theory behind all the practical experience I had gained during my apprenticeship.

Again, Mac's were the machine of choice, but with only one 2-hour session available in the computer suite per week, we quickly needed to buy our own machines for home.

After attempting to render totally impractical 3D images to use in design and illustration projects (they could take up to 2–3 days and most of the time you thought the machine had frozen, but then it would make a quick whirring sound and you would breathe a sigh of relief!) I met up with another student at college who was studying 3D modelling to get in to the games industry and he had an Amiga in his arsenal of personal computers at home.

Churning out 8-bit graphics in his attic on the Amiga became my preferred medium whilst studying and featured heavily in my final year show! 4 years later, a successful end to college was approaching and I was headhunted by an educational multimedia start-up that was working with after a successful work placement with them during the summer.

My first job was developing a game to run on Mac, PC AND Archimedes platform for our the Education team at the Pedigree Pet-food company and with no developers in-house, I had to hack up a piece of software called Hyper-studio that allowed me to build animated stacks and link between them to pull the whole project together.

16 months and 18,000 hand-drawn graphics later (I scanned my paper and ink illustrations and coloured them in Photoshop), the game was complete and was launched at the Natural History Museum and even went on to be nominated for a BIMA (British Institute of Multimedia) award.

I spent a few more years working on digital educational projects, but after the birth of my son, I decided to go freelance to experience designing for other industries and worked for a wide range of companies throughout the UK.

However, I had spent a lot of time in Spain with my family as a youngster and I wanted to find other opportunities. As I spoke pretty good Spanish, I decided to move to the Valencia region to start my own design business and alongside the graphic design and illustration work I provided for local businesses, I found myself developing websites for them using HTML and 'tables' for the layouts and integrating simple CMS's for the data. CSS was purely reserved for font styling!

After 8 years of running a successful business, I returned to the UK to bring my son back to finish his school education as he wanted to go to university.

I managed to work my way into a company in Lincolnshire developing websites and e-learning solutions for the Football Association by quickly learning (over a weekend) how to develop CSS layouts and how to embed JavaScript plugins to build an interactive site with my son throwing some flash graphics in to give it some extra impact.

It seemed to work, and I started on the Monday…

It was during my time at this company that I met a developer who was managing the software department next-door. Unfortunately, he left after I was only there for about a year to set up his own business, but I knew enough CSS then to be able to stand on my own as a front-end developer, so I followed him out of the door 6 months later…

After a short time freelancing again, we hooked up together, with me building the front-ends of websites while he developed the CMS systems.

I remember the first day walking in to the office and he said 'Forget everything you think you know, this is how I want you to do it from now on' and he laid out the plan for developing HTML5/CSS3 websites and web applications (we were the first company, locally to start using them).

After 8 years of designing and styling the front-ends and back-ends of websites, ecommerce sites and software applications and developing graphics and illustrations for marketing and SEO clients, I would say I am finally able to understand what the role of a developer is about, albeit from a different perspective.

Even in my creative area of the digital industry, having an understanding of the processes the developers take in creating software, the tools they use, the frameworks they build upon, all goes towards designing 'usable' graphics and user-friendly designs that not only appeal to clients but make perfect sense to the developers building them.

If you want to work in a team that thinks you are just a 'crayon boy' you better start learning some code, however basic :)