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I’m a designer who makes films and builds websites.

I spent five years at Project Exodus, a recovery organisation in Durban. Most of it was film and design. I directed and edited documentaries, two of which aired on TBN Africa, and built up the organisation’s video work over time. The brand and the everyday design I worked on alongside another designer.

This past year my work moved into front-end. I was part of the team that rebuilt the organisation’s platforms in Next.js, where I built the shared component library, the website front-end and the resources page. I came to it from design, leaning on people who knew more than I did.

Underneath all of it is the same judgement. Whether a cut lands. Whether a button feels like it wants to be pressed. I learned that in design school and I’ve spent the years since pointing it at unfamiliar material.

William Owen in the Drakensberg

What I work on.

Design & brand

Visual identity and brand systems, typography, layout, UI/UX, illustration and infographics.

DavidJames.Africa logo on an embossed card
Key art for the Vantage recovery programme
Pull-up banners for the Groups and Small Group Facilitation courses
Typographic apparel design, front and back

Film & motion

Documentary and narrative production, editing, colour grading and sound, 2D motion graphics, 3D texturing, photography.

Front-end

Component-driven UI, responsive implementation, Git/GitHub workflow, performance and accessibility.

The rebuilt homepage, live
A sunrise shoot on a ridge above the cloud line

Tools

Figma · Affinity · Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign & After Effects · DaVinci Resolve · Blender · Next.js / React · GitHub · VS Code

Education

National Diploma in Graphic Design, Durban University of Technology, 2020. Graduated cum laude, second in the final year.

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Open to remote and Durban-based work