Nick Shaw

Fracture Media Syndicate

I'm Nick Shaw. I'm 25. I've got a BA in European Languages. I can ask how to get to the airport in four different languages. I've also got a Diploma in New Media with honours from Media Design School. I used to live in France. I don't have a dog but I want one. I love Sarah. Mike and Jimmy reckon I'm a perfectionist, but I'm tryin to chill. I've got some tattoos. I wish Bodhi was here. I don't drink or do drugs, straight up. I'm into movies that other people think are shitty. I have a fetish for tacky motel signs. I try to work hard and stay posi. That's about it for me.

I've always been kinda creative, I was always into drawing and stuff since I was a kid, I used to draw my own comics and shit. Design must have just come as a natural next step I guess. I started designing for the web by teaching myself some HTML. Then I made a website, and I thought it might be pretty cool to make some more so I did a course. I got pretty psyched on Flash after school, so I taught myself how to do some Flash stuff.

It's pretty hard to pin down, for me anyway. Whatever I'm into at the moment will just come through in what I'm doing, naturally. I'm always trying to develop it, especially at the moment I've been really working hard on it. I've never had any formal training in design, like design theory and that, which I'm super interested in and I'm learning a lot at the moment. I guess "experimental" would describe my style pretty well right now, cos I'm going through this big self-enforced learning curve and trying a lot of new stuff.

Ah, I started Fracture straight out of my New Media course at MDS in 2002. I'd already decided I had to do my own thing, and I definitely didn't wanna go work for someone else. It just seemed that there was so much potential on the web to make amazing work, and to really push outwards in every direction cos the technology was so new and developing so fast. And with all that potential, the web was still 99.9% whack. Only a few people as far as I could tell were out there doing the kind of stuff that I wanted to see up there. So I got out there, managed to grab a couple of really great clients straight away, and Fracture has been going pretty strong since there.

We're real lucky with the clients we've got, that they were willing to back us at the start and trusted that we'd come through with we said we could do for them. We try to take really good care of our clients too, that's something we really push. And they like the work we do for them, which is the bottom line, and for me that's the icing on the cake. A lot of the clients we have now are people I looked to for inspiration when I was starting out, and now we get to make stuff for them. It blows me away.

There's three of us now in the Syndicate. We've got Mike, who is our database / programming genius, and James McKee who is a total design guru. And me. We all work together on the business strategy; I really like the idea of us, as a creative company, approaching our business strategy as another creative process - the more minds, the more ideas getting thrown in, the more potential there is to do something really cool. And we'll be taking a direction that everyone has been a part of determining. It's really exciting. We're doing stuff now that I never even thought I'd be doing.

We're not planning on expanding into further areas, like taking anyone else on for a little while. Right now between the three of us we feel we've got a really solid skill set to offer our clients, and we want to concentrate on incorporating ALL those skills into our projects. That's gonna produce some really exciting results, if everybody's going hard on combining our powers, we'll be making Voltron giant robo-beast sites. Plus we're also developing some web-based applications which are going to be killer. So now we're doing products as well as services, and each complements the other. There's a lot of cool stuff coming up.

Hopefully in the way that we're trying to take it! Haha. I think the future of communications, and very much the future of the web will be integration. Like what's happening now with say, cellphones for example - they're now web capable, you can browse the web on them, get email, send photos, get roadmaps, whatever you want. Pretty soon it'll be, a server in your house, in your car, in your office, controlling phone, tv, computers, everything. All hooked up to the net. I'd like to see the web become a lot more user-friendly, networked as smart as possible, accessible to everyone from anywhere. In the shorter term I'd like to see a lot more people, businesses, industries and communities networked together, better, sharing resources. That's where Fracture is going in the future. And everything a lot better looking! That's what I'm here for anyway.

Oh, just anything. Whatever I'm doing, right then. I take a lot of photos, which is fun, it keeps me looking at the world with "the analytical eye", y'know, thinking about the stuff around me. I'm real psycho about movies, I watch a lot when I can. I'm into typography at the moment, starting to really explore that. Working with two guys as talented as Mike and James keeps me motivated. What else gets me through the day...? listening to the Misfits. Hangin with my missus. Mike's attempts at design, haha. Just having fun doing what I'm doing, that's what motivates me. The fact that I love my job and I get to do it every day.

The Fracture brothers Mikey H and Jimmy Magoo, my friends, my fam, my girl, all our clients (thanks!!), FTM Crew, my boy Ryan for doing this interview (woop!), Richie Hardcore the Fracture Enforcer, TPL, the Keppell Street Rollers, Sacred brothers, and anyone who's ever put their faith in me or helped me get to where I'm at. Thanks! Peace.