About

Who’s this?

Hi, I’m Matt Hill, a professional digital designer and developer. I was born in Brighton, England in the early 1970s where I lived until moving to London in 2007. I now live with my partner and son in Gravesend, Kent.

I’m a creative person with myriad outlets: digital design and development, model making, writing fiction, designing book covers, modding video games… the list goes on. I pursue them all with enthusiasm as time permits.

Historic architecture will turn my head: medieval castles, Victorian terraced houses, ancient Egyptian tombs. And time spent in art galleries is never wasted. Maps are another fascination (both real and imagined), while my love of the natural world, birds in particular, finds its way into my creative projects.

In my youth I was a voracious reader, mainly speculative fiction and weird fantasy. Now that my capacity for dystopian doorstoppers has diminished to diddly-squat, it’s refreshing to read shorter books. Chonky tomes have no place in my current life: for those I await retirement with excitement! These days I’m reading mostly historical fiction and magical realism, while in non-fiction I’ve re-discovered my love of illustrated bird books.

I used to cycle a lot and still try to get out on the bike when I can, but these days most of my spare time is spent with my young son: I came late to parenthood and it’s proving to be a marvellous adventure.

Work

Right now I’m working on the gov.uk website as a front-end developer. I’m also in the process of moving back to interaction and UI design: that’s where I started and where my heart remains.

Previously I’ve been a web designer, user interface designer and eLearning multimedia developer. I’ve been doing this since 1993 and have contributed to nearly 200 digital projects which is pretty remarkable when you think about it.

Website

After I became a dad at the start of the pandemic, I took my old site offline as I had no time for it. In 2024 after successfully raising our baby out of toddler-hood, I had some time and space to think about resurrecting my site.

There were a few false starts due to my uncertainty over scope: I wasn’t quite sure how I wanted to use the site. I was trying to create something that reused all my old content while also trying to do new things, and none of it was working.

Eventually I chose to create a new portfolio site as part of the drive to find a new digital design role. However, this took me much longer than I’d anticipated and in May 2025 when I wanted to start writing about a new project, I decided to relaunch the site as a simple blog.

I’ve kept the old journal but deleted a few outdated entries and some of the, erm, weirder articles. Moving forward, I’ll use the journal to document my self-directed projects and write about my interests. I’ll add a portfolio and other sections later as time permits.

Colophon

This is the twelfth version of my personal site since I started building them more than twenty years ago. That’s kind of nuts, but reflects my creative energies and the changing fashions of the web. The last few versions ran on Craft CMS but that became much too heavy to maintain. I now use the brilliant Zola static site generator.

I have a philosophy of using only open source or freely available resources for my public-facing projects. When it comes to typefaces with permissive licences, we’re spoiled for choice. After much experimentation, I decided on Sentient for titles and body text and Public Sans for way-finding and secondary text.

Sentient is a modern serif with quiet authority and a warm personality. It’s highly readable on screen and has a lovely italic face unlike many serifs where the italic ends up looking scratchy and awkward on screen. Public Sans is a highly modified derivative of Franklin Gothic and very readable for navigation and labels.

The icons are by Tabler Icons.

My domains were previously registered with Google, with the hosting on Netlify. But when Google sold their domain business to Squarespace in 2023, I moved all my domains to Cloudflare and the hosting to Cloudflare Pages. This is the neatest setup I could find, which allows me to keep domain registration and hosting with the same provider and deploy simple static sites with the minimum of fuss.

Updated in May 2025