Digital Multimedia Designer and Developer

My current role is as Head Designer for the Systems Development Group at Unilever Research Laboratories Colworth.

This involves creating concept designs for web sites, brochures, logos and branding concepts, story boarding. I will use a mixture of Macromedia Fireworks, Corel Draw, Adobe PhotoShop, and 3D Studio Max, to create the initial concepts.

Once a final concept has been chosen I then produce the final designs. This is where a lot of the usability and interface design comes into play. Once the team is happy with the final design I produce a set of html templates for the next stage.

As well as a designer I am also one of a team of 12 programmers in the group. My main skills here are ASP [VBScript] (3yrs) and Javascript (4yrs).

The second part to my role is Development Assistant. This is more of a Project manager Role purely for Web Applications. This role involves speaking with clients and determining their needs during the concept stage of web sites or software applications.

I will select a small team of 2-3 developers and myself as a designer and developer, plan, manage, and control the project. This includes the successful completion of concepts / final designs / demos, within time and budget.

The clients are quite often Managers from departments throughout Unilever Research who require web sites or software applications developing. Recently we have had to find external funding and are currently working with Unipath to update their main global site and product sites. (http:// www.unipath.com/)

Part of my role is to look after the 5 Development Web servers we run for the rest of site. We are currently running Windows NT boxes with IIS 4.0 and Windows 2000 boxes with IIS 5.0 web servers, MS Access 97/2000 Databases. We originally started off with and still have 2 NT Boxes running Netscape Enterprise Server 3.x and Chili!Soft ASP with Oracle and Access Databases.

This role includes responsibilities for the day-to-day support and administration of the various features of the software to those requirements that evolve over time. These include: system and business requirements definition, installing and updating software, development of performance management plans, management of security, user accounts and performance of maintenance activities.