About Maddison Designs

Maddison Designs is a small, independent design studio based in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Operated by myself, Anthony Hortin, I specialise in web design, web development and graphic design. I can provide my services no matter whether you’re around the corner or on the other side of the globe.

My background is actually more technical, than creative. For a long time I was employed as a ‘code monkey’, developing applications and utilities day in, day out for a large corporate in the finance sector. I was also involved, at various times, in setting up & rebuilding PC’s, setting up and configuring Networks and Servers and testing systems.

Most of my earlier development experience was with PC’s and client-server technology. Over the years I’ve had the “opportunity”, for one of a better word, to be involved with a wide variety of applications. Some of which include;

  • Extracting Foregin Exchange Spot Rate information from AAP Reuters to produce Cross Rates
  • Development of a communications system, using Microsoft C, that facilitated communicatons for an Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT) package between mainframes and PC’s, over an X.25 Packet Switched Network utilising DES Encryption, CRC’s and error checking
  • Various Novell NetWare utilities written using Microsoft C, the NetWare C Interface and NetWare Client SDK
  • A C++ “customer management”, 3-tier client server-application that utilised CICS to transfer data to and from mainframes via an OS/2 Server.

In the late 90′s, when this internet-thingy started to become more widely used, I transitioned into web development. Over the years, I’ve had experience with a wide range of technologies such as ASP, PHP, MS SQL, MySQL, XML/XSL, WML, WAP, Visual Basic, COM, VBScript, JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, Adobe Flash & ActionScript, just to name a few. I was involved in a wide variety of applications such as;

It was not long after delving into the web development, that I also became interested in website usability and the design side of creating applications and websites. It’s all well and good to have an application that has all the “bells & whistles”, but if the interface is too complicated for the end-user, they’re not going to able to find the information they need. This is where usability comes in. Creating sites that are not only pleasing to the eye but are both Accessible and easy to navigate.

After many years of pure development, I slowly transitioned into more creative roles. It eventually got to a point where I was purely designing and didn’t even need to touch any code.

With my own business now, I have the luxury of being able to perform both roles. One of the great benefits of having a technical background such as I have, is that am able to design sites that not only look sweet but are designed in such a way as to produce clean, uncluttered and efficient code. Knowing how a site is developed can be a blessing when layin’ out pixels. Sometimes, it’s amazing the difference it can make with developing a site, simply by moving an object a few pixels over, one way or another.

Why Maddison Designs?

I often get asked where the name “Maddison” came from. The answer’s simple… She’s the love of my life, my beautiful Boxer, Maddie. Full name, Maddison Inyapen Starblaze. As well as being a great companion, she’s starred in numerous television commercials both Nationally and Internationally and also feature films. Some of her credits include Maxwell House coffee, Honda Odyssey and the Feature Film – Noise, which received rave reviews at the Sundance Film Festival (obviously because of her appearance ;-) ).

Maddie

Maddie

Maddie

Maddie’s just recently turned 14 (Dec 2009 – which is exceptionally good for a Boxer) and as you can see by the above pictures, is starting to look her age, with lots of grey. Even so, she’s still as happy and cute as ever. Sadly, Maddie recently passed away at the ripe old age of 14. Just 2 ½ mths shy of her 15th birthday. She’ll be missed dearly. Rest in peace beautiful girl :cry: