About me: David Earl

Writer and curator Emily King said: ‘Poised at the intersection of so many disciplines – film and art, music and photography, architecture and typography – graphic design is perfectly placed to take advantage of technological convergence.’

This struck a chord, for my background is in graphics technology but my future is in photography and design.

I broke my arm at 12,000 feet walking in the Rockies in 2001. That symbolises for me a break of a different kind, a turning point. After 20 years, I stopped working with graphics software. At one time I helped build computer-aided design systems for a company called Shape Data, now part of EDS. For the latter and larger part of that career I developed software for the printing industry, with another Cambridge company, Harlequin
(no, not the romance books), latterly renamed Global Graphics Software, where I was eventually Chief Technical Officer for three years.

So I gave that up to become a mature student at Norwich School of Art & Design (now Norwich University College of the Arts). I studied for a BA (Hons) degree in Graphic Design, specialising in photography, from where I graduated in June 2005 with a First. Not my first brush with education in Norwich, I did a BSc degree in computing in the late 1970’s, also achieving a First, followed by a computer graphics PhD in the days before the subject was mainstream, both at the University of East Anglia.

Since then I’ve been a freelance designer and photographer. Designing web sites, especially those supported by a database, comes full circle to include both software engineering and design. To add printed material and photography, especially if it involves maps too, brings my whole range of skills to bear.

I’m an advocate of cycling as a means of transport, mainly though Cambridge Cycling Campaign.

Latterly I’ve become a major contributor to OpenStreetMap, a project to map the world. As surveyor my horizons are somewhat more local: I’ve mapped all of Cambridge and much of the surrounding area for the project. I also contribute to its software.