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Hi there, I’m Tom.

I’m a web designer and developer living in the small town of Halesowen, UK. I love making websites, really, it’s one of my favourite things to do and I’ve been doing it as far back as I can remember!

I graduated from Aston University in 2008, and have since been doing freelance work when and where I found it. I currently develop freelance webs with Replenish New Media for clients including Grammy Award winning musician™ Imogen Heap.

By the way, I saw some of my previous design work being buried over here somewhere... Maybe it's hidden a bit deeper down?

So more about me huh? I'm an avid gamer, bet you couldn't tell that! I play everything and have a weakspot for retro games and MMORPGs. When I'm not saving the world I enjoy watching anime of other people saving it for me, doodling away and making sweet music with my bass guitar. Basically, I pretty much just refuse to act my age.

Want to know a bit more about me?

I made my first website back when I was 14 (that’s over 10 years ago, yes I’m old) for a Counter-Strike clan that consisted solely of myself and my cousin. The clan never took off because from that point on I was obsessed with making websites. Granted, they were abominations to look at. Animated gifs all over and a horrible looping midi track in the background. Oh and I vividly remember using a “cool” font without realising that no one else would be able to see it (you’ll be happy to know that I later offered a download link so people could get it themselves to experience my website to the max).

Since then I’ve never stopped. Gradually my skills improved and I decided this was what I wanted to do for a living, because it’s not really a job if you love it right?

I primarily work with Wordpress CMS, because it’s awesome. My toolkit includes HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, PHP, MySQL, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. I try to keep my abilities as up to date as possible and I’m always looking to expand my knowledge. I’m also a huge fan of social networking (go check my twitter) and Apple products (I’m sorry. I just love Coda).

Oh so that's where my portfolio was hidden!

Feel free to click through to take a closer look.

Electric-Lady Cosplay
Heapsong2
Radius Music
Rogue States
Tideswell Cottage
Maxwell Cooke

Three new albums that fuelled this redesign

January 23rd, 2012 by

Since I made this website on my new laptop, I didn’t have access to the vast gigs of music sitting on my mac, so I pretty much only listened to three albums the whole time. Good thing they are three fantastic examples of new music huh?

Supercommuter – Products of Science

Ex-Optimus Rhyme frontbot Wheelie Cyberman doing his nerdcore best over some fantastic sounding LSDJ beats. It’s the best thing that’s gone into my ears in a long time for sure. The problem is that it leaves me craving more chip-hop of this quality, and that’s hard to find. Stand out tracks for me are “It Is Splendid!” and the beautiful but somewhat depressing “Frozen”.

Dungeon Elite – New World Disorder

I’ve loved these guys since they started, but their last album was a huge disappointment. I’d all but given hope on them getting away from the weird happy hardcore mess that was Dance Dance Evolution but then they put this out and all is forgiven. Amazing sounds and some of the catchiest tunes ever, with a few dubstep wubs and drops thrown in for good measure. Highlights? “Monochromatic” is perfect (go check the video) and “Tesla” has the greatest blend of Maia’s vocals, dubstep noise and Fadas screaming.

AA=(aaequal) – #3

Former Mad Capulse Markets bassist and all time hero of mine, Takeshi Ueda, returns with his vegen digital-hardcore troupe and delivers another album of delicious distortion for your ear holes. This band is filling the void left when MCM disbanded and I’m pretty damn happy about that. You can’t just listen to one track of this, it’s the whole thing or nothing, so go do that. Do that now.

Welcome to the brand new 8bitcore.com!

January 23rd, 2012 by

Quite a drastic change, don’t you think?

My last wordpress install got hacked to pieces (I was unable to update it for a week or so, must have been an update that patched that security hole… oh well) so here I am starting from scratch. Nothing of any importance was lost anyway. And it gave me a reason to do a redesign. Who’s laughing now, hackers?

Alright they probably are laughing. At me. Still.

Moving on! New design, lots of jQuery going on up there thanks to the awesome Spritely library. I was playing some old games at the time and the parallax effect really stuck in my head so it had to be done.

I guess I better go launch this site officially then. Away I go.

Get in touch, I should be able to hear you from down here...