I’m Tobi Forsdyke.
I’m a designer and all-round creative currently living in London.
I consider myself a uniquely skilled production machine with the ability to fit perfectly into a team or to be able to cover the entire production workflow of a digital project. My years of experience have equipped me with a wide range of skills including storyboarding and illustrating children’s books, print design layout and editing, animation and video editing and web design and development. I love to learn new things every day and am a problem solver who enjoys finding new and creative solutions to existing problems.
If you want to make me happy, create a challenge for me.
My story…
I’ve loved drawing since a very early age but I fell in love with computers sometime in the early 80’s, when I was around 7 or 8, watching my dad inputting sound measurement data into his computers for work and drawing the comic strips he used to make for fun. I always loved the mix of data and graphical elements and so when I got my first computer, an Amstrad CPC 464, I immediately immersed myself into the world of both text-based maths and word games and playing graphical adventure games. Oh the joys of typing in commands to make a program run, or finding a new area complete with glorious pixel-based artwork and scenery after hours of exploration and puzzle solving!
Back in those days the free demos that came with computer game magazines didn’t always come as cassettes sellotaped to the cover. Sometimes they came in the form of two or three pages of printed code at the back of the magazine and I would happily lose hours meticulously typing it in more for the joy of creating and watching it unfold than to actually get to the game at the end. This taught me at an early age the importance of getting your spaces, syntax and punctuation correct so as to avoid those dreaded errors after typing in RUN”, although a big part of the enjoyment for me was always in hunting down and fixing the errors in my code at the end. And then came the tinkering! Once the game finally ran without errors I would immediately go back to the code and start changing parts to see what effect it would have. One of my earliest coding memories was editing the space invaders clone demo ‘Weetabix vs the Titchies’ to change the ASCII characters, make the main weetabix character change colour and the background purple, change the shape of the aliens and adjust the location and timing of the exploding rockets.
I eventually migrated to an Amiga 600 and discovered Deluxe Paint where I would while away the hours creating pixel-based monstrosities in this early Photoshop-like software and even created an (admittedly very basic) Batman animation which wowed my sister and then saddened me after the floppy disk I had saved it on corrupted. The days before cloud backups! I was also introduced to Apple Macs in school and began creating my own black and white point-n-click adventure games using HyperCard (this point and click way of moving between documents eventually paved the way for my interest in web designing which in turn got me back into coding). I also used to draw illustrations for our school newsletters which I then helped layout in our school Mac suites early version of QuarkXPress. So drawing, creativity, design and developing were always at the forefront of everything I did and I was never entirely sure whether I wanted to do something with a fully creative focus when I left school or whether I wanted to do something with a more technical focus, so I studied both…
After this I became a Graphic Designer in a small design and print studio where I provided an all-round graphic design, illustration, DTP and web design service while also giving one-to-one training in QuarkXPress and Photoshop. From here I then progressed on to also becoming the parent company’s IT Manager and Designer and also became a qualified assessor for their apprenticeship programme.
Now…
I have been working as the creative hub of a large charity arts organisation now for over 20 years. This started out as designing their printed annual reports and leaflets to then creating their websites and editing films and creating motion graphics. This has made me an advanced user of most Adobe Creative Suite apps, especially Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After Effects, Animate and Acrobat. I have also been a user of Dreamweaver although not as much since I now build websites mainly by hand-coding the HTML, CSS and JavaScript of CMS builds in WordPress or Drupal. My software skills are easily transferrable as I have been creating using computers for so long that I have blurred the lines between QuarkXPress and InDesign, Flash and Animate, Final Cut and Premiere, Photoshop and Affinity Designer. I think that once you have a deep understanding of the principles involved in the tasks then the type of computer and the apps you use become less important. I am equally as capable working across multiple platforms and softwares.
Right now I am working hard for a charity that is expanding its creative and media programmes, upgrading its network infrastructure, considering a rebrand with a new logo and also in need of a complete website rebuild. All of which rests on my shoulders so I am quite busy! Outside of work I am working on my second illustrated children’s book and will then start storyboarding the third one which I already have the idea for. I might then try my hand at a bit of self-publishing.
I’m open to change and always looking on the bright side of life. Looking for new projects and new challenges, at the crossroads between wanting to be freelance and still wanting a secure permanent job and considering the possibilities of moving into a new full-time role or finding something part-time. Do you want to help me shape my future? Or maybe you could use my skills to help you build yours? Don’t hesitate to contact me for a quick chat.