Today marks 20 years of Hicksdesign!
Hicks.design started back in January 2002 after eight years of full-time employment, when our daughter Samantha was just six months old, it provided a way of being flexible with my time to look after her. Tuesdays and Friday's were non-working days, where we did things like build a pirate ship out of everything that came with my laptop.
I also wanted to pursue 'new media' as it was known then. I was working at Heinemann in Oxford, an educational publishers where Leigh and I were both designers, and it was clear I was never going to get my foot in the door of the recently formed 'e-learning' department. By leaving, I could teach myself web design, starting with (Macromedia) Dreamweaver, and then by 2004 I was hand coding. I've never looked back.
After all this time I probably should've worked my way up to be some VP of Design at some company or organisation like a lot of my peers have. I had a brief 18 month stint leading a design team at Opera Software (2015–2016), but that's the extent of managerial experience.
I've always preferred making to managing - whether that's caused my lack of managerial skills or been the reason I've avoided such positions. Here I am, twenty years later, and hoping to get at least another ten!