1 post tagged “mattwebb”
My vox blog seems to be the place for these sorts of 'LiveJournally' things, so I hope Webb doesn't think I'm cheating.
Here are five trivial things that most people won't know but couldn't
possibly be used to socially-engineer me (I have a theory that all such
memes are a masssively-distributed I.D. theft scam) - enjoy!
1) I illustrated a two-page Judge Dredd story at age 14. It was in the
1987 Judge Dredd Annual, and was the only story ever to feature Dredd
and Ace Garp. I'd won the chance to do it through a children's TV show
called 'Splash'. It was written by Alan Grant who was wonderful about
it all (as were the entire editiorial team, including Steve
McManus/Tharg) and spoilt me rotten with advice and help. I got paid
for it (handsomely, I thought) and put the money towards buying an
Atari 520STFM. I never got to draw comic books professionally, but
perhaps I will when I grow up.
2) I wanted to study graphic design or typography at college, but got
disuaded by a combination of my father, Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy (I thought graphic designers would be on the Golgafringian B
Ark) and having a massive unrequited crush on a girl who was going to
university, not art college. Hence, architecture - and all the fun
since. The irony, of course, is that I now have a job that is deeply 'B
Ark'.
3) I had glandular fever through my 'A' levels (the final exams you do
before leaving secondary school around 17/18) which meant that I kept
falling asleep during the exams and had to be nudged awake by the
invigilators. I got it from snogging someone on my 18th birthday, who
then dumped me. All I remember about her now is that she wore pop
socks. I probably benefitted from some kind of lucid dream recall
effect, as I got pretty good results.
4) I got a travel scholarship from my university to visit Los Angeles
in 1994 and stayed with an alumni of my architecture school who was
working for Richard Meier on the Getty Center. I got back to Cardiff
and couldn't afford to publish my report in order to claim the balance
of my scholarship, so I taught myself HTML and published my first
website, which got me my first job working on the web back in 1995. My
queries on web design and HTML were answered by Rob Hartill, who was at Cardiff working on the very first version of the IMDb and Heather Champ, who was creating lovely websites for the architecture school at Princeton.
I guess this is where I'm meant to tag five people? So I would like to hear from Jack Schulze, Dan Hill, Chris Heathcote, Desiree Milosevic and of course, Foe Romeo...
