James Angus

James Angus; a 25 year old ~~web developer~~ user interface developer living in sunny Brisbane, Queensland (Australia). I’ve been in the game officially since 2002, but I’ve been tinkering with zero’s and one’s for many a year previous.

Occasionally I put on my designer hat and hence I have recently adopted the "dev-igner" monicker.
While the majority of my work and expertise centre around PHP and MySQL development, I am also well versed in XHTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Neat-meaningful code, descriptive commenting and Abstraction mean a great deal to me and have pushed me to explore Ruby and Python in my free moments.
I understand that one of the developers' key roles is to make the Users life easier. Whether that be using semantic-standards based code for the designers to template, using meaningful labeling in code or applying accessibility and usability principles to an interface; Being lazy and cryptic isn't an option in my book.

This has led me to become a devout adopter of the MVC paradigm and always be mindful of potential security issues.
Sometimes the term makes me shudder a little, as it's all too often used incorrectly. But, from the perspective of giving a site-visitor more control and opportunity to interact, I'm quite comfortable to name drop technologies like AJAX, JSON and DHTML with which I have a good understanding and experience.

However, I'm an advocate of progressive enhancement and graceful degradation and do what I can to apply these philosophies to any enhanced project I work on.
To say that I enjoy what I do would be a gross understatement. Every day is another opportunity to learn, expand and perfect my skills which is motivated by the question why?. If I don't immediately understand why something is, then my mission is to answer that very question.

A shelf full of technical books and two or more hours of daily research and keeping up to date is the result of my inquisitive mind.

With the release of their new E-3 professional camera body, Olympus commissioned SM2 to build a site to showcase professional artists who use Olympus' products.

70% of the site runs off the custom-built "Pro Gallery" component that I developed so that Olympus staff could manage the site in the work-flow that best suits them.

Photographers, who are approved by Olympus to be showcased on the site, can login to the site and manage their profile, their photos and gain access to professional support services.
As a digital music distributor, Musicadium has to look good and function flawlessly online. Hinging off the aesthetic from the design team I implemented (and iterated) two "pathways" for visitors to access the core functionality of the members area; one for clients of Musicadium, which is simple and intuitive; and another that is more verbose, with powerful functionality at arms length for the Musicadium staff.

My involvement centered largely on the user-interactions, reporting, integration with the outlets (itunes, emusic) and the protected API.
Tasked with building a custom Joomla! component to manage Olympus products, I also built the markup, styling and behaviours for the design templates as well as several modules to aid the functionality of the website.

The custom component allows the Olympus staff to quickly and simply update their product line according to the work flow that suits them best. Much of the process is automated by the component which I built from the ground up.
Following my previous design work on their business cards, the Prospect Rd team asked me to put together an eye-catchy site to help them grab attention and communicate their message.

The website design plays off the “road” metaphor, using bright colours from the logo to draw attention to different information on each page. The site is running on a Wordpress installation with a number of 3rd party plugins to make it easy for the team to update.

Check out my Flickr set of design work if you so feel inclined.

Really get inside my head by making your way over to my blog.

Or, if you feel compelled to contact me, feel free to use the following form:

This site was made with love using web standards, on a mac, with TextMate.