Howdy
Hi, I’m Darren Newton and this is my site. I’m a creative professional living in New York City and I’ve worked for S/M/L/XL corporations designing user interfaces, building sites, developing marketing campaigns and questioning assumptions since 1999. I love design and technology, they’re two great tastes that go great together.
Code-loving designer lives here
While my background is in fine-arts and design I also love programming. I’m not a very good programmer per se, but I know how to get things done (like this site for instance.) I’ve always felt that if you’re going to design for the web, you should know how the web works. Besides, programming is creating, just like pushing pixels in Photoshop.
I’ve always been interested in interactive/online programming, all the way back to my teenage years when Atari 800s and Apple IIs were cutting edge. These days I focus on developing simple web applications and sites to keep my saw sharp. Wireframing the specifications for an AJAX powered widget is a lot easier if you know what AJAX is and how it works. So while I’m not a professional programmer by any means (you won’t find a CS degree in my resumé) I am intensely curious about the way things work and I love playing with dynamic languages.
Life story
I was born in the Lone Star State (3rd generation no less.) My parents were shockingly prescient and sent me to computer camp at age 12 when they realized personal computing would be ‘the wave of the future.’ So while the other corn-fed locals were bashing their skulls on the football field I was hacking apart BBS software in BASIC on an Apple IIe. The following years were filled with various telephony misdemeanors and fiddling about with IBM PCs. Until I discovered girls and traded in the whole computer thing for skateboarding and punk rock.
This was followed by Art School. Which led to some time living/working/drinking in London, followed by more Art School where I picked up a graduate degree in Sculpture. I figured New York should be next on my list.
I landed a job at a small financial startup called Multex.com. Lo and behold all those countless hours spent on the command line in the 80’s came rushing back as I hammered out HTML for Netscape 4 day in and day out, learning it all the Wild West way.
One thing led to another and soon I was designing user interfaces for complex financial products, producing advertising and storyboarding the odd video. Various mergers and acquisitions found me working for the Corporate Marketing division of Reuters where I helped to redefine the way Reuters presented itself both on and offline. I got to travel, work on projects with very interesting people, and otherwise greatly expand my skillset.
Eventually Reuters itself was gobbled up by a large Canadian company called Thomson. Around this time I decided I needed to get away from super-sized-corporations for a while and left to experience the travails of a freelance creative type. It’s been… interesting.
