About Me

Stunt Car Racer (1989)

My full name is Richard Mann, and I have held a keen interest in web development & design for several years now. I have also held an equally keen interest in computers in general since long before my web career started, having owned a computer from the age of around 7 or 8.

I got my hands on a much more powerful computer some years later, and have been upgrading it ever since. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that I like to invest some of my free time playing PC games - I can't let many months slip by without wanting to upgrade my computer for the latest releases, which I'm sure is a familiar feeling for many a fellow gamer. :) A few of the games I am playing currently (or have played recently) are Aion: The Tower of Eternity, Champions Online, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Fallout: New Vegas.

Photoshop CS2: My first foray into graphic design

Outside of gaming, I've dabbled in Photoshop for many years, and that's largely what got me into web design to begin with: one of the very first sites I made was for my former Guild Wars guild, and I built it using a combination of Photoshop and MatchWare Mediator. From there, I became increasingly curious about how websites work, and through the combination of college, uni, experimenting at home and creating websites for friends & family, I learned how to be a proficient web developer and designer.

Thanks to my oldest brother, I also like to produce electronic music once in a while. I currently use Ableton Live and Adobe Audition to do this - with very mixed results (no pun intended). Sometimes it takes me just a few days to produce a track from start to finish; other times, I'll spend much longer tweaking one until I'm 100% satisfied with it!

Despite never fully understanding the attraction to blogging and "micro-blogging", at the end of 2010, I made a serious attempt at starting a personal blog on which I feature some of my music and web designs, and sometimes publish news either about my personal projects or big developments/occurrences in the web industry.

My featured designs usually end up on my deviantArt account as well, so if you're a member over there and/or a fellow creator of websites, you might be interested to see it for my submissions as well as the beautiful designs I have gathered in my Favourites. :)