More about me

Hey there! 👋

I'm Paul and a long long time ago I was a Designer, but after a few years of pixel-pushing, I realized code is just better. I've held various positions in and around Advertising, Tech and Product Development in both full-time, and freelance positions since 2005.

I once co-founded and ran an award winning digital production agency based in London called super natural . I started the company from my kitchen and grew it to a team of 10. From 2012 to 2016 I was hands-on designer/developer, and Technical Director / CTO.

Then

Back in 2005 after graduating Leeds Metropolitan University with 1st Class honours in MultiMedia technology I got my first job for a little design and development studio called ward404.

Our main projects were building eCards for record labels such as EMI, Warner and Virgin Records, we'd take album artwork and design and build Flash micro-sites to help promote album or single sales. These micro-sites would typically involve an intro animation and showcase a 30 second video trailer and an audio preview player.

A little while later Rich Media burst on to the scene so we transferred all of our learnings from micro-sites over to Rich Media advertisements.

This shift in design and development landed me a job in advertising and I worked for Play (M&C Saatchi) from 2008 where I continued to design and develop Flash Rich Media campaigns and picked up multiple awards for my work... including a D&AD for an interactive out of home sound driven animation to promote RNID. During this period I received a promotion and managed my first team of two.

including CHI & Partners, RKCRY&R and BBH to name a few. I then started a contract with TBMWA (MAL) which is Apple's creative agency... naturally they couldn't use Flash for their online campaigns so we developed HTML / JavaScript and later CSS animation libraries and methods to bring animation to the iPhone.

In 2012 spotting a gap in the market for HTML Rich Media campaigns I started Super natural from kitchen. Six months in and i was snowed under with work so teamed up with ex-play colleague Jon Bezalel. Together we grew the company from a team of two, to a team of ten and continued to work with top London creative agencies and clients including Channel 4's 4Creative, ITV Creative, Netflix and adam&eve among others.

We developed engaging and delightful online campaigns and micro-sites, and picked up a few awards along the way including a BAFTA for our Digital Creativity work on Channel 4's Humans.

During this time I was a hands on designer, developer and oversaw all creative and technical output, trained and mentored members of the creative teams and engaged with clients to develop creative ideas.

In 2016 I felt the time was right to move on and with the rise of JavaScript frameworks I decided to take a leap into React application development.

Now

For many years I contracted as a Component Library and Design System specialist, my love of Design transferred well from my creative past into modern day web application development (where everything looks like Material Design), and my background in Flash / ActionScript meant adopting modern JavaScript was a breeze.

In 2018 I discovered Gatsby and immediately fell in love with the developer experience and feel it's a brilliant middle ground between using a framework like React and brining back some of that internet joy we lost when websites became web applications

I'm pretty active in Open-source and everything I've done can be found on my GitHub: https://github.com/PaulieScanlon

From 2020 onwards I've become increasingly interested in technical writing and have had multiple articles published on well known publications such as Smashing Magazine , CSS-Tricks and The New Stack

My work at Gatsby combined my love of creativity from the past and fuses it with technology from the present to create hard hitting, educational, promotional and some say _sensational_ product demos which drove product adoption and growth.

My work at Cockroach Labs allowed me to continue using everything i've learnt over the years and combine it with the new stuff.

I continued to hone my skills while working at Neon, and I'm now more confident than ever that I'm able to use everything I've learned from both sides of the stack to become an Independent Advocate

I'm a huge fan of process and have worked with some really great developers in some very well organized engineering teams. For balance, I've also worked on teams that weren't so organized — but I still get the job done!

but...