Exhibitions - Printed Presentations - Online (Web) Presentations

When I was working at Oxford for a higher degree, a well respected American professor of biological science - Richard Dickerson - introduced the co-author of his recent book at a conference I attended. Irving Geis did not have a scientific training; he was an artist - and this fact sent a little shock wave through those present - a bit like a layman addressing senior doctors at a General Medical Council meeting. However Irving Geis could do what the scientists present could not. He could draw and paint beautiful images of the complex structures of biological molecules that scientists like Richard Dickerson and others were revealing for the first time. These images were compelling. Not only did they help scientists understand how these biological molecules might function, but they could be also be used to communicate novel emerging concepts to non-specialists. These artistic representations truely bridged the arts and the sciences - they were creative communications.

Permanent Presence - the power & the problem of the World Wide Web

Today the internet and the mobile phone are probably the pre-eminent forms of communication, even eclipsing TV. Both have vastly increased the quantity of exchanges between human beings, yet the quality of the actual content that these powerful new communication methods convey is often relatively poor (witness e-mail and text messages!). Perhaps because they are so easy to achieve, their creators do not put much thought into them - when did you last compose a real letter? Everyone is encouraged to turn to the Web for information, yet the reliability, authenticity and accuracy of the information we find is open to question - to say the least. Since 1994 (when the web was mainly the plaything of academics) I have aimed to use it to provide accurate and updated information - though admittedly a little biased towards my client's products at times. Some of the Websites I have designed and produced are shown below (click on the name if you are interested to visit them). I should stress that the design and maintenance of some of these have now been taken over by my clients themselves - and quite properly too - businesses should always aim to run their own information service eventually. The downside being of course that they can then say whatever they like about their products and services!

More on Web design . .

Creative Conferences

A major part of my creative communication work has been devoted to presenting quite technical matters for both private and public sector clients. The culmination of 6 years of work for organisations including the UK Research Councils (SERC, BBSRC, MRC), the Department of Trade & Industry and small and medium-sized hi-tech industries was the launch of my 'POPE' conference series (see image left). These employed all (then) possible means of communication:- books, journals, newsletters, a.v. presentations, exhibitions, workshops, interactive Web - CDs (see below) and Internet - based resources.

Getting the message across in print

Communicating using print has been one of the major tools of my trade and my business has held public sector contracts for over 6 years to design, edit and produce publications which interpret and explain public sector funded research to a non - specialist audience (including politicians!). The colour newsletter format is typical of this type of work and these two examples (for the DTI) were brought out to mark and celebrate UK university - industry collaboration (below) and the success of The Human Genome Project (right). The latter is world-wide effort to obtain the sequence of our human genetic material, in which the UK has been a major player

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