Pumkin Creative

Running a design and development agency and making websites from photography portfolios to healthcare support applications.

Project: Design and Development Agency
Role: Founder

What started as me moonlighting as a web designer, within a few years had become Pumkin – where I built and led a team in producing websites and apps for Sony, Red Bull, Airbnb, Dartmouth College, Hilton Hotels and The Korean Ministry of Culture Sports & Tourism among others.

Pumkin started in 2008 and became well-known within photographic and advertising circles as a producer of fun and creative experience-led websites. As well as designing experiences, we collaborating as a development partner with many London-based design agencies including Saatchi & Saatchi, Moving Brands and Made Thought.

Below are some my favourite projects from this period.

We worked with design studio No days Off and photographer Finlay McKay to create this suitably theatrical website for performer Paloma Faith at Sony Music. Doves might have flown out of the stage and around the screen, but you could also book tickets, catch up with Paloma's social media feeds and download the latest single.

Rearranging Jarvis Cocker in a gallery of images on East Photographic's website.

Pumkin's main focus for a long time was the photographic industry, and we built multiple iterations of our image asset manager, Sigma. It started as a PHP-based system to manage a single artist's work, and culminated in Sigma v2.1, with a full drag-and drop interface, support for multiple divisions and artists, private portfolios, video and more.

Brain injury support charity Headway East London asked us to design and build a website to share their member's stories (we later built Headway's own website too). The site was designed to be as accessible by default, with devices to help navigate the stories in different ways, such as by keyword – all of which were developed and tested with input from Headway members living with different cognitive impairments. A full set of keyboard shortcuts was available too, as well as widgets like a scrolling progress indicator to help the long-form stories seem more manageable. Stories from the website were later featured in the Guardian newspaper.

Pitstop practice (Kindly staged for us to build a nice website out of it)

We worked with Realise Creative and Red Bull Racing to build an interactive factory tour for the launch of the new Toro Rosso Formula 1 team. The tour took viewers through 5 different areas, each staged in different parts of the garage with information about the different elements of what takes place behind the scenes, and featuring hidden gems including an intruding racehorse, a paper aeroplane contest in the wind tunnel and team principle Franz Tost hosting a game of Scalextric.

Director Park Kwang-su meeting fans at the London Korean Film Festival

Over a long-running collaboration with the Korean Ministry of Sports, Culture and Tourism, we re-branded the Korean Film Festival and the Korean presence at London's Thames Festival, built several iterations of the film festival website (and eventually developed a comprehensive archive of Korean film for visitors to browse), produced large scale display graphics for gala events and opening nights, advertisements, brochures, social media material and lots more.

And many more!

We were really lucky to get to work on so many different and varied projects over the years – it was chaotic, we had to deal with Internet Explorer 6 and a lot of legacy work in Flash – but it was always fast and fun, I met some extraordinary people along the way and learned in huge amounts from each of them.