“He has opened doors.” —Laking

Gavin Laking was born in 1978 in Louth, UK. He began a course in graphic design, but stopped it to pursue the web. He ended up taking a BTEC National diploma in Graphic Design at DeMontfort University (an A-level Art & Design and AS3D design).

Gavin finds inspiration in his immediate environment by “Watching Guinness settle is a good time to do some creative thinking, me and a couple of friends usually end the day in a bar armed with pens and notepads — idea storming; and drinking. I also get inspiration from sites on the internet and from working with other designers,” explains Gavin.

At the moment, Gavin has two online design projects The Designer Network and Designstrasse.com. He began web designing three years and a half ago, when he would print documents at a friends houses. “My friends showed me the web, and some of the things that were possible, and that was it! I was hooked! I took print outs of loads of resource sites (HTML, source codes, etc.), and set about learning the language of the web. I had a good grounding in programming to start with, as I have been using a variety of computers since I was 6 years old,” says Gavin. The Designer Network was launched in October 1999; it originally complied of a large list of design related businesses on the net, but soon became very difficult to maintain. A year ago, The Designer Network had 9200 links, and had to be trimmed down to the status of 1000 links. “I’m actually in a big fight at the moment with myself, over the changes at TDN. I would love to keep it nice and uniform for a long period of time, but I get sick of seeing it; so I redesign it , when I should be adding those backlog of unlisted links. Every couple of seasons I get a new outlook on colours and style. I should be a fashion designer!.”