CEO & Founder
Born in Melbourne and educated in Systems Design at Monash University, David moved to Sydney in the early 90s. An entrepreneur from a very young age it wasn’t long before he launched a small multimedia and music video production company specialising in low cost (and low profit!) productions before spending a number of years freelancing in various roles for various big companies he’d rather not name. Towards the end of the decade he travelled through Europe, settling in London where he continued to freelance at several brand and digital agencies while enjoying European beer and not enjoying English winters.
Returning to Australia in 2000 for a wedding David fell in love and spent a year reading Chomsky and other miscreant thinkers, watching the dot com world eat itself and considering his next move. Much to his surprise he decided to dive into activism, combining his creative skills with a new found passion for social and environmental issues. While working at a crazy dot com start-up that shall remain nameless he moonlighted with a team of media mischief makers to create the ‘Unolympics‘ – a satirical take on the Sydney Olympics. Another collaboration involved projecting an image of a tall ship with the words ‘Boat People’ emblazoned below 12 metres high onto the Opera House.
Inspired by the people he met and the success of these early experiments in using design to make a difference, David launched one of Australia’s first values driven agencies Digital Eskimo in early 2001.
Career highlights include the award winning (and government changing) Your Rights at Work and Message In a Bottle campaigns for the ACTU and Amnesty International respectively. In 2007 the grassroots Raise The Bar campaign, co-founded by David and designed at Digital Eskimo, was pivotal in successfully replacing draconian liquor licensing laws in NSW. In 2008, Sydney Magazine named him as one of Sydney’s Top 100 most influential people, they made the same typographical error again in 2012.
He is a founding member of Sydney’s biggest and best green networking event greenUps, is a founder and director of the live local Foundation, and holds a seat on Object Gallery’s 2015 Creative Advisory Board.
David can be followed online through our blog, or on Twitter or on (increasingly rare!) occasion at his personal blog, The Gravy Train.
