Freeway Media. An independent magazine publisher based in Shoreditch before it was fashionable, which tells you roughly how long ago this was.

Freeway Media was an independent magazine publishing company, and I was the Production Manager and Senior Designer, which in a small publisher means you do more or less everything. I designed magazines from front cover to back page: a cruise title, an airline directory called Gateway, and a magazine called Pride of Britain which, I should say quickly, was significantly less alarming than the name suggests. It was a tourism publication. Lovely photography. No flags.

A big part of this role turned out to be digital. Websites were just starting to become a real thing, and Freeway wanted them for every publication. So I designed and built sites for the full portfolio, which at the time meant teaching yourself HTML on the job and hoping nobody looked too closely at the code. It was scrappy, fast, and genuinely exciting in the way that only early web work could be: nobody really knew what the rules were yet, so you just made it up as you went along.

Looking back, it was the role that taught me how to do a lot with very little, how to move fast without dropping the quality, and how to work across print and digital before most people had decided those were different disciplines. All of which turned out to be quite useful later.

I'd love to show you more from this period but the evidence is scattered across roughly a hundred hard drives in my basement, most of which require cables I no longer own. If you find yourself desperate to see a cruise magazine from 2001, I'll need a weekend and an IDE adapter.