Andy Fitzsimon Open Source Designer Specialising in visual & interactive open technologies.

Full Name
Andrew Michael Fitzsimon
Telephone
+852 66800187
Email
andrew@fitzsimon.com.au
Website
Linkedin Profile
Weblog
andy.brisgeek.com
Skype
brisgeek
IRC
andyfitz@irc.freenode.net

All About Andy

As a designer working in a technical team, Andy is a bridge not a border.
Pencil, paintbrush, toolkit and scripting framework; Andy does justice to an implementation with beautiful and functional results. Plus, being most familiar with an open source software workflow, Andy prototypes his designs in working technologies to get real results sooner.

Interests

Travel, Rollerblading, Design culture, Photography, Music, Friends, Freedom & Happiness (yours too)

Community Involvement

  • Inkscape Developer/artist 2004 - Present
  • Scribus User/tester2006 - Present
  • Open Clipart Web design & clipart contributor 2006 - Present
  • GNOME Desktop Art Contributor 2005 - Present
  • AIMIA QLD chapter executive committee member 2002 - 2003
  • Lansmash Admin Memeber 2000 - 2003
  • Red Cross Volunteer & blood/plasma donor 2000 - 2003

Employment History

experience summary

Red Hat - Singapore

Senior Web Engineer Feb 2008 - Aug 2008
  • Interaction & Interface design
  • Information design
  • Graphic Internationalisation
  • Design thinking
  • Social Design patterns
  • Corporate communication design

Red Hat - Brisbane

Graphic Artist - Content Services 2005 - 2008
  • Technical illustration
  • Interaction design
  • Open source graphic design training for APAC Red Hat customers
  • Publishing software development
  • Desktop publishing
  • Design Thinking
  • Internationalisation tooling

Fitzsimon IT Consulting

Director / Open Source Graphic Designer 2003 - Present
  • Developing with web standards
  • Graphic design & Illustration
  • Desktop icons
  • Typographical font design
  • Production toolchaining
  • Training & consulting
  • Open source evangelism
  • Drupal & Plone CMS deployment
  • Occasional flash production

Clients include: Red Hat, Ubuntu, Canonical Thiess

Fiducial Technology / Fiducial Group

Graphic Designer 2002 - 2003

Worked in a software development team using web standards, flash and javacript to produce interfaces for content-focused web applications.

  • PHP, XHTML & CSS Templates
  • Flash animated websites
  • Corporate brand
  • Stationary design
  • Client consulting

Andrew Fitzsimon Consulting Services

Sole Trader 2001 - 2003

Multimedia development as a contractor.

  • Icons
  • Animations
  • Websites
  • Technical support & training

Colmar Brunton Research

Website Development Manager 2001 - 2002
  • Built and deployed national website using Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash etc.
  • Provided technical software and hardware support for staff members
  • Workstation purchase and assembly

Epro IT Solutions

Staff Training Macromedia Flash 2000
  • Flash, Dreamweaver & Photoshop tuition
  • Training staff to produce multimedia content for ozevents.com.au (now offline)

Technology Expertise

Software

Image
Illustration
Animation
Publishing
Tools
Productivity

Public Speaking

Andy can be a bit of tart when he's passionate about something.
He has shared his knowledge on open source design at grass roots technical conferences and software user groups throughout the world.

GUADEC July 2008 Istanbul, Turkey
Artisitic fundamentals for developers
Libre Graphics Meeting May 2008 Wroclaw, Poland
Open source toolchain & Inkscape innovation
OSDC 2007 Brisbane, Australia
Designing with free software and the creative class
Libre Graphics Meeting May 2007 Montreal, Canada
Open Source Graphic Design workflow and toolchains
Linux.conf.au January 2007 Sydney, Australia
Recent open source design innovation & creative commons integration
Libre Graphics Meeting March 2006 Lyon, France
The open source designers workflow
Linux.conf.au January 2006 Dunedin, New Zealand
Open Source Graphic Design - voted 'best of' for an encore presentation

Presenter at user groups and universities across Australia, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, France and North America.

  • Libre Graphics Meeting

    Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

    The Libre Graphics Meeting is an annual get-together for developers & users of open source creative software. For this years meeting, Andy designed a series of illustrations combining visual metaphors of each participating project.

  • SystemTap

    SystemTap

    SystemTap is a fantastic deep diving tool for administrators and software developers. Unfortunately, its painful to use. My design attempts to make analysis a more light hearted experience.

  • Linux.conf.au

    Linux.conf.au 2007

    In 2007 Andy designed the linux.conf.au visual identity. His designs appeared embroided on countless bags, hats, shirts, posters and even in sub-conferences like gnome.conf.au

  • Open Document Format

    Open Document Format

    The Open Document Format logo required a more finished look to compete for mindshare. Andy created the following campaign graphics during the Microsoft OOXML ISO debate

  • Open Source Publishing

    Publishing & Publican

    While at Red Hat, Andy created thousands of technical drawings. Each carefully constructed in SVG format so that text translation may be automated without authors having to edit each file in a design tool.

  • Open Source Fonts

    Open Source Typography

    Ubuntu-Title the typeface of Ubuntu and all derivative branding.

    Freefinity was produced for the Fedora project during brand development.

    Road Stencil was created for an Australian engineering firm and released for general public use

  • Open Query Identity

    Open Query Brand Identity

    Open Query is an Australian company offering Training & Support for the MySQL database and other open source software. Andy was comissioned to design their brand.