About
On a Personal Note
This website is my little place on the web. My name, as I'm sure you've gathered, is Nathan Beck. I'm a standards driven web and print designer from Manchester, UK. I've been designing for little over 2 years and am now lucky enough to work for Flame Digital, an online marketing and new media agency in the city.
I don't have to wear a suit.
Although a large portion of my life is spent in front of a glossy iMac screen, I do try to break away from my geeky bonds and enjoy playing guitar and piano in my spare time. I occasionally skateboard and love skiing and snowboarding, even though I very rarely get chance to do it.
In the online world, besides designing and research, I'm gradually falling in love with blogging. Redswish started out as a test but has now become an almost daily obsession to broadcast my views and opinions, accompanied with a portion of valid news to anybody who wants to listen.
With this latest version of nathanbeck.co.uk, I've also revamped Redswish to fuse the 2 sites together and strengthen the link between myself and the blog.
Pushing Forwards
In the world of design, I'm still a noob. For something that's only been around in a mainstream sense for little over a decade, web design is an extremely varied and deep subject. But I'm constantly pushing to learn more to try and work my way to the top of the pack.
I put a lot of emphasis on accessible, standards driven web design. From both a business and ethical view, ensuring websites are built to accommodate the majority of operating systems, browsers, monitor sizes and users is essential. Future-proofing builds, and clean, beautiful designs are integral to create the best online presence possible.
The majority of my sites are built using Wordpress, adding content management functionality for clients. However, I prefer hand coding sites to ensure valid markup and tidy, semantic code. My primary weapons of choice are Photoshop and Textmate. That's it, that's all you really need. I build sites in valid XHTML and CSS, with a dashing of AJAX or PHP where necessary.
I love what I do, and it's great to look back over 6 months and see how I've advanced. I still have so much to learn, and this being such a fast-evolving industry, I will never stop learning. I can't wait!
The Future
[insert cheesy motto] - who knows? I've tried making plans before and those plans have changed dramatically. I could tell you my current plans, but in 6 months time they'll surely be very different. So I'm going to live for today and see where it takes me.
