Lyraspace

About

Hi there. I’m Lee Probert. Lyraspace is a company I started in 2007 after working for over ten years in the Multi-media industry. I wanted to start a company so I could experience the great wealth of opportunities that are out there and didn’t want to stifle my creativity by staying within one industry. I’m glad I did.

I have the advantage of being experienced in all aspects of interactive media. I started my career retouching digital photography and printing exhibition panels. This gave me a fantastic insight into digital imaging and I’ve worked with Photoshop since version two … that was before layers! From there I found myself imaging presentation graphics to slide. In those days everyone needed their overhead projectors if they wanted that killer presentation. Before long people caught on how easy it was to present off their laptops with Powerpoint; unfortunately not everyone knew how to design their slides. So I began my design career working with Powerpoint, Quark and illustrator but was always dipping into other programs like Corel, Aldus Pagemaker & Aldus Freehand. Before I knew it I was a dab hand with all of them and eager for more.

With the advent of CD-rom authoring the demand for rich, interactive presentations meant we had to buy a load of new kit and I had to lock myself away in the office and learn Director 4. In those days everything had to run on an 8-bit display so I had to learn all about colour, palettes and optimisation. Debabelizer was the software of choice and it was a fine art to make those early products shine. I excelled in producing cutting-edge titles mixing my talents between After-Effects and Director to blur the edges of video compositing and interface design. We produced great work over there at MagMed but the best was yet to come.

The internet blew us away and in those early days the demand for CD-rom titles was still very strong because clients still wanted those rich, vibrant experiences. Flash had just been released and with the release of Director 6 you could import SWF assets into your presentations. This meant I had to learn Flash and I jumped at the chance to get involved with this amazing, revolutionary tool. Our initial Flash work was predominantly animation but it soon became apparent that Flash could offer us a whole lot more.

We were guilty of the occasional Flash intro or three but we also produced some fantastic sites too and I was soon finding myself more and more interested in the programming of Flash and games development in general.

It was soon after that I left the Midlands to start my career in London. I worked with a company called Hypnosis back in 2000 and we did a lot of Microsite work for the music industry. I soon found that 99% of my work was Flash based and more and more of it was games or activities.

I then found myself working with Cimex and again, everything was built in Flash. This time I was mainly building e-learning games and activities. It was at Cimex that I studied standards compliant web-design and accessibility and this is still a passionate interest and advocacy.

After Cimex I started at Ogilvy and was introduced to the world of Digital Advertising. I became an expert in banner production; studying all the different platforms and intricacies. It became apparent that banner production was a fine art and this taught me a lot about optimisation. I also built large, localised microsites and got interested in building Flash sites with complex back-end services and content-management systems. More and more my Flash work became complex and pretty soon I was authoring using Object Oriented Programming principles and following design patterns. I realised that I was indeed a coder but was lucky enough to have the designers eye as well. After producing some great work at Ogilvy and helping them move forward with their Digital department I decided to go freelance, start my own consultancy and experience as much of the digital era as I could.

So, here I am. I now develop Flash content using the Flex framework and am involved with the Adobe team directly as we welcome a whole new suite of amazing products like Catalyst and Flash Builder. I still like to sketch and design and have an active interest in the world of design and illustration but I spend most of my time now developing Flex applications and consulting. I’m also looking into emerging mobile platforms like the iPhone and the Android OS while always keeping a firm foothold in the designers realm.

Lyraspace has a technical blog at the following URL : http://blog.lyraspace.com

and I have a personal blog for rants and more general lifestyle opinions over at http://leeprobert.com

My Google profile : http://www.google.com/profiles/leeprobert

LinkedIn : http://www.linkedin.com/in/leeprobert

I should not be confused with the famous football referee Lee Probert.

or the rock musician Lee Probert.

If you are a Lee Probert and wish to be exonerated from this site then please get in touch.