About me

My name is Tony Swaby and I've been involved in the creative industry for almost 40 years. I refer to myself as a designer and I've worked in many roles from visualizer and graphic designer to art director and creative director and for the past 20 years the digital world has been my playground.

I trained as a graphic designer and I worked in numerous advertising agencies and design studios at various levels. I ended up as creative director for a great (pre DTP) design studio, there were lots of talented people with incredible skills. Then "bang" the MACINTOSH arrived and the design world changed forever.

I'm the sort of person that likes to do everything, I love to draw and paint and do all the things that made me want to be a graphic designer. But I've always liked technology and I saw its arrival as liberating, I could do even more. It was the late 80's so it was pretty basic stuff. I could get a MACINTOSH (that's what they used to be called) and just replace the typesetting bit of my job, but that wasn't enough for me. I wanted to make things "interactive", the buzzword at the time. The MAC didn't cut it so I built a PC, much to the disapproval of my designer friends. That's when my journey really began.

I was playing with something called "Hypertext" (that's the first part of HTTP, but the internet hadn't been invented yet) and tools like Director. I designed what I called "electronic publishing" and set out on a quest to convince people this was the future. I wrote to various Universities telling them of this new thing and how it would impact on the creative world. De Montfort University in Leicester contacted me and said they didn't know anything about this "new thing" (which was now being referred to as "Multimedia") but offered me a job lecturing on their visual communications course. The idea being I might give the students an insight in to how the creative world was changing.

This was great for me, I could spread the word, so to speak. Whilst I was there I had some very interesting discussions with the other lecturers, many of whom dismissed what I was saying. But I was determined to show what this new medium could do and I created my first interactive, multimedia application of technology that would meet a real need in a new way. It was called "Career View" and was published on CD ROM. Very few schools had computers let alone ones fitted with CD ROM players. But undeterred, I got the latest video capture card, learnt how to use it and went out and filmed real people in real jobs so kids could see what it was actually like to be a Zookeeper, Hairdresser, Mechanic etc. So from being a traditional graphic designer, all logos, leaflets and lots of craft skills, I had found that I was about so much more.

Today the Internet offers incredible possibilities, but I'm still "Designing things that make a difference and using the latest technology to make it happen" My latest project is Appraisium - a tool that creative students can use to get real-world feedback from people who actually do the job they want to do.