About
Hiya, my name is Pete Ottery & I'm a web designer. Grew up in Newcastle, bought my first camera in Year 9 with the money I'd saved up working in toys and sporting goods at KMart, Waratah. I started doing Mechanical Engineering at Newcastle Uni, but found myself in the library reading photography books between lectures. Ok, maybe I skipped a few lectures. Anyway, I dropped out, and switched to a degree in Fine Art, majoring in photography in my last year.
When the I.T. boom started to kick off, I moved to Sydney and started doing some freelance design work for Blue Cork. We were doing work for Fairfax. One thing led to another and I wound up in a fulltime role, seeing Fairfax though a few name changes along the way which ended up as Fairfax Digital. Spent 5-6 years there, ending up as the Head of Design after designing sites like smh.com.au & theage.com.au (the first major news sites in Australia to use CSS for layout, circa 2004), domain.com.au & mycareer.com.au. (All of these have since had various rounds of updates or redesigns since - as is normally the case.)
I then worked for a year at Daemon - a specialist web dev company focussing on blue chip clients. This was a great spot - I was able to have a great impact working on a CMS they built called FarCry, built some css templates called Mollio, and designed sites for clients like BlueScope Steel and the Taxation Institute of Australia.
In April 2006 I headed over to News Digital Media to take up the role as the Head of Design. In early 2007 I became Group Interface Designer - working across the full gamut of NDM sites (as opposed to just Media).
Some of the sites I redesigned at NDM are careerone.com.au, truelocal.com.au (again, both have had updates and additions since my time), and an iphone-targeted version of news.com.au (fire up that url on yr iphone to see it), and most recently carsguide.com.au.
In November 2009 I finished up at News Digital Media to become the Creative Director at WhistleOut.
My linkedin.com profile is here for those into that.