Who Are We?
A Profile of Stuart Fraser - Director of SJF Media Solutions
Hello, my name is Stuart Fraser and I was until recently employed as an eBusiness Developer for a very well known multi national company
As the job title suggests, the role was wide ranging, encompassing many aspects of electronic delivery. The main role was development and delivery of a UK Intranet to the parent company and it's utilities, design and development of commercial and industrial databases and front end web applications for auditing, recording, managing global change requests, IT projects and tasks and provision of online SQL database reporting
A Step upon the Road
Although I left school early to take up the offer of an apprenticeship in the building trade I always harboured a deep interest in art and design, one of my many unfulfilled ambitions was to be a political cartoonist like my childhood hero Giles, whose books used to entertain me greatly while waiting in the 'doctor or dentist's waiting rooms.' I was always amazed how his characters could be very simplistic but his backgrounds were often rich and expansive, detailing the changing face of Britain and its people as surely as any photo journal.
When my company implemented TPM (a Japanese business methodology) I joined the team as an illustrator to help with introducing TPM techniques to the workforce, this covered topics ranging from technical drawings of machines highlighting lubrication and maintenance points, one point lessons (illustrations showing the effects before and after modifications) , illustrated HOW TO booklets right through to high visibility posters.
It soon became clear that using art in industry was proving to be a very effective tool and as such the role began to expand into non production areas.
An early illustration project was a series of awareness posters helping to promote company mission statements. the Juggler (pictured above right) taken from one of these posters has been adopted (all be it in a stylised version) to provide the Logo for SJF Media Solutions. It has always seemed (to me at least) to embody the premise that providing solutions is never static but ever-changing.
An Evolving Role
This evolving of the role also necessitated a more modern approach running parallel with traditional illustration. The need to publish and re-print work required different skills to provide high quality graphics in a variety of electronic formats.
The opportunity to work with an Industrial Director who was progressive and could see the possibilities for advancing communication to all levels of his organisation, was instrumental in hastening electronic imedia as a business tool.
And from the mid 90's multimedia came of age, the use of projected presentations not only became the tool of choice for daily business, but also for the the huge number of visitors both public and industrial who were applying for visits keen to experience and see a progressive and successful modern business.
However, we quickly found that we needed to entertain our visitors if we were to make a largely industrial process a rewarding experience. Provision of a large modern conference suite created a requirement to push even further the boundaries of audio visual presentation, and by a mixture of corporate video and the creation of our own video and animated content we were able to promote our rich motor sport history and also explain complex industrial processes in an entertaining manner.
We became very slick at presenting our audio visual displays and soon found that we were in demand for the staging of some high level mini conferences, not only within our own organisation but from other external companies. A great deal of practical experience was gained from this venture.
Diversity
At this time I was also a partner in a multimedia company called Moving Eye.
As a result we were able to produce professional quality booklets and manuals, presentations and training materials ready for commercial or in-house printing.
The job also expanded into the commercial market with increasing demand for layout in advertising and marketing literature.
Commercial Illustration
Over the years we have been fortunate to be offered a variety of commercial projects that has allowed me to utilise my love of drawing and cartooning with commissions for T shirt printing, logo designs, restaurant & cafe menus, beer labels, event advertising, product assembly instruction, posters and caricatures.
A chance meeting with a commercial printer to produce some booklets proved to be a rewarding experience and a lasting friendship leading to an invitation to produce his company christmas cards. This for me has been a source of real pleasure with almost complete freedom to explore many madcap ideas. Mind you, a strong sense of humour was required as my friend is always the butt of the joke and has been portrayed cruelly many times. Thankfully he seems to to be able to laugh at himself (at least I hope so?) because this has become a tradition that has continued for many years. You can view some examples in the portfolio section.
Our Journey in Web Development
From the other pages on this site you will notice that our early background was very much based on graphic design and multimedia development. A request to provide a number of interactive online learning packages for specific workforce training needs led to a whole new set of skills.
We had all the skills needed for the interface design, but at the time no web developers were available for the back end programming.
Learning a whole new set of skills was necessary to successfully host and record the results of the training. It soon became clear that there was a need for these skills in the UK I.T. team, so the role of web developer was added specifically to introduce a UK Intranet and to pursue the possibilities offered by this rapidly improving technology.
This was an exciting and exacting few years with many training courses and countless hours spent learning several programming languages, database technologies, server and web security and with each new skill the role expanded to design and programming of industrial and commercial databases, development of secure multi tier web applications * to provide industrial waste recording, load order systems, stock tracking, commercial auditing, managing global change requests for SAP programming, IT projects and task tracking, staff locations and online database reporting . Externally we also produced commercial and marketing content for use on official sector and utilities web sites i.e. Flash banners/headers, online quizzes as well as several web sites.