Interviewed - Contributed by the Institute of Technical Education, Singapore

If someone hands you a name card that prints his job title as “da graphik guy”, would you believe that he was once ranked as the top three graphic designers in the world? Well, you better do, for that person would be Anthony – WorldSkills Medalist, co-founder of a design house named Geeksigners (www.geeksigners.com), and professional urban illustrator. That’s right, people pay him good money to illustrate. Even the Singapore Armed Forces noted his talents and Anthony spent much of his compulsory military service illustrating for the Army’s national recruitment campaign.

Geeksigners – what’s that all about?

(Grins) That’s the company my partners and myself co-founded. We do a variety of designing works, from hand illustrations to computer animation, posters to a few websites. We have a mix of talents and among us we can find solutions to meet most of your publicity and branding needs!

Work takes up quite a bit of my time now, but it’s where my passion lies. You see, I’m not the type who can study well. My parents were quite exasperated with me – they believed that artists usually end up poor and struggling to make ends meet! But drawing was what I had always wanted to do – I had my first paid design job with a popular Singapore radio station when I was still in secondary school. So you can imagine, when I did manage to get into engineering school, it didn’t take long before I couldn’t handle the Mathematics and got out of it to enroll in design school....

Cheers,

Howard