Martin Hastings

Studio Manager

Co-founder of Broadening Horizons, web, graphic designer and overall head of all departments. Until this version of the website Broadening Horizons has gained approximately 95% of it’s work from word of mouth, but now Martin feels it is time to push the name out to those who haven’t been told about us and start to bring in specific work for specific areas in order to broaden the company’s horizons.

Originating from a programming background, Martin got a taste for the design industry back in the 80’s when he started to write and design manuals for the software he’d worked on and then proceeded to design packaging to correspond with the software.

Almost 20 years on and he still loves anything design orientated.

Starting off in traditional cut and paste, working with a repro camera, varityper, drawing board, rotring pens, an airbrush and a Letraset catalogue of type he learned the fundamental basics of design, typesetting and by working for a small print shop in Washington Tyne & Wear he often worked in all the other departments, getting a taste of everything that went in to producing various types of print.

From there he went on to work in a design studio in Sunderland as a junior designer, but within two years knew more than his department manager and often took on the manager’s roll until leaving to help create and manage the design studio of a new print company in Houghton-le-Spring.

After 10 years working for that company and having watched it grow from 3 staff to 15 he decided that the direction he was going didn’t allow him the creative freedom to experiment in new media, and, bored with working day in day out designing business cards and letterheads and occasionally getting interesting work to sink his teeth into, he decided enough was enough and left to create his own company.

With the support of his partner Yvonne they came up with Broadening Horizons, a company aimed at applying design to any media they came across, not only in general graphic design, but also online, large format, t-shirts, mousemats, mugs, the list goes on.

Although Martin has many interests, his current dedication to restoring Broadening Horizons to it’s original growth strategy of 2006 means that he has very little time to do this, however he does still have an interest in DIY (although never gets time to build anything), is a keen guitarist, gamer, artist, and likes a lot of American TV shows including Medium, Heroes, Supernatural, Smallville and Fringe. Currently enjoying America’s Nurse Jackie and Mental, and UK’s Kingdom.

My aims for 2009, starting July 6th 2009 are to get Broadening Horizons back on track to where it was heading in 2006 before the fire, to build up specific work for the four key areas of the business and employ key members of staff to populate each of these areas and improve both the company and the level of service we offer to our customers

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