Director
Useful Design

Alastair has twenty something years experience in design including graphics, film VFX, music video, art direction and web. Coming across Quartz Composer (QC) on a OS X 10.5 install disk reignited his (mostly self-taught) childhood interest in programming as it combined graphics and coding using concept of reusable/patchable code modules that didn’t require to much coding knowledge to get started.

He’s deployed QC based applications and tools in various fields including custom visual effects for movie titles and live sporting stat graphical overlays and a visually appealing twitter-wall mixed onto video feeds displayed at sporting stadiums, for example the International Rugby series games hosted in stadiums around Australia. Since Facebook released it’s internally developed Origami extensions to QC, Alastair has been exploring the emergent specialisation of Product Design which focuses on the intersection of graphics and code for rapid prototyping of very expressive app interactions, without the costly and timely overhead of producing compiled native code installed to the device for each iteration or design concept variation and tangent.

Alastair is a founder of the Vuo visual programming application (vuo.org) that attempts to solve some problems designed into the Quartz Composer paradigm and leapfrog QC into new visual coding language possibilities, including support for up to date OpenGL shaders and rendering.