About Rich

The Concise Version

Hello. I'm Richard Hinchcliffe. I'm a digital designer living and working in the UK, doing everything from motion graphics and 3D design to web design and build. I've been on a never ending quest to try make pixels look good since 1999 when I got my first PC, and don't intend to stop any time soon.

The Verbose Version

Hello again. You know by now that I'm Richard Hinchcliffe. I was born in 1979, and I've got a degree in archaeology and geology. Really, I do. I graduated from Durham university in 2000 with skills that could have probably got me a job sat on an oil rig or digging up muddy fields looking for saxon belt buckles, but I decided to give those career paths a miss and sat alone in my bedroom in my mums house, teaching myself how to build websites and use Photoshop and 3D Studio Max instead. To this day I don't know why I didn't actually do some sort of creative degree or new media course at university. Only after I graduated did it strike me that I'd been interested in art and drawing and animation since I was a child and that might actually be a fun thing do do for a living. But been young and forced to make a decision, I decided a geology degree seemed like an awesome idea. Anyway kids, it turns out that the degree I got didn't mean shit, it was just a fun way to spend three years.

For a few months after graduating I survived by winning pub quizzes with my friends and wishing I was still at university pretending to learn things. But those good times couldn't last and I had to get a real job - one that paid me actual money instead of beer and free pub food.

I built myself an embarrassingly poor website (at the time I thought it should have won awards - I'll try dig it out some time) and sent that along with a few illustrations disguised as a portfolio to places all over the UK in the hope that someone, somewhere would employ me. Someone did, an IT company in Coventry. They took me on as their junior designer and I learnt on the job. I was there for a few years and I learnt a lot from the other designers, but I slowly became more powerful than my masters, handed in my notice and moved back up north. I don't think they cried when I left, but I like to imagine that they did.

Now with some experience under my belt and some actual work to put in a portfolio, I sent stuff out to local design agencies, again hoping one of them would see some potential in what I could do and give me a job. Within a month or two I'd bagged a job at Ripe in Leeds and spent another few years in full time employment. I learnt more new things and became even more powerful until the day came that their four walls could no longer contain me and I decided to leave and go freelance instead. I like to think they cried when I left too.

Now I work on my own clients projects, or I do freelance work for various design agencies, mostly in Leeds. What I'll be doing in another 10 years time I have no idea, but that's fine with me.