About Joe Sergeant
I'm a self-confessed technology geek, surgically attached to my iPhone and computer. I also work full-time as a designer for a web development company based in the heart of Cheltenham.
I was born approximately 22 years ago in Gloucestershire, where I’ve lived all of my life. I have a couple of parents, a sister, two cats and a dog.
Things I’m good at
My expertise and passion lies in writing semantic XHTML and CSS. I pride myself on being able to take a flat visual design and translate it into a website template using the best possible construct methods.
I often find myself in awe of other designers and can only hope that their talent will start to show through in my own work as I gain more experience with every site I design and build. At the moment I really enjoying designing clean, simple websites, which are predominantly typography focussed – like my own!
Away from technology I’m also a keen target pistol shooter and attend a club every week with a friend. We’re not too shabby at the moment although during the winter the range is bitterly cold, which doesn’t help when aiming down the sights!
Learning can be fun too
Although the extent of my coding abilities stops at PHP I’m really trying to get into ASP.NET MVC. I would also like to try my hand at freehand vector work, so if you’re feeling generous I’d love a free Wacom tablet!
I’m a big fan of everything that HTML 5 and CSS 3 are bringing to the table. As soon as Internet Explorer 6 dies a horrible, painful death the sooner we can all harness these new standards to produce some truly fantastic, interactive web content.
My day job
I work for Firehoop as a Creative and Technical Designer. I will have been there for 5 years in July 2010 and as far as I’m concerned, it’s my dream job.
I’ve always had a passion for web design and spent a lot of my school life working on such projects. I decided against going to university on the grounds that I had already chosen a career. I didn’t want to endure another 3 years of education for a degree which may offer little or no return on the investment I’d have to put in. It was at this point I decided to scrape together a portfolio and try my luck in the real world. An interview later and I was taken on at Firehoop as a junior designer. “Luck”, indeed!
From there I’ve matured both my skillset and business manner which has enabled me to remain in a position of trust as the company has expanded. As well as carrying out my official job title, I also administer the servers both in our office in Cheltenham and our production ones in a London datacentre.