A bit about nathan

Nathan has been involved in interactive design and development since the mid-nineties — back when a single person could reasonably be expected to do everything, most clients still weren’t entirely sure what a website was for and when 56k dial up was considered fast.

He studied Three Dimensional Design at The Berkshire College of Art & Design in Maidenhead, where he used early multimedia packages such as Photoshop, 3D Studio Max and Acrobat as an alternative to the expected pen-and-paper deliverables. He was presenting his final product concepts interactivly on screen, at a time when almost nobody else was doing the same thing.

His first professional break came at a small local print agency in Reading called ODB, where he was quickly thrown in at the deep end when the company landed the contract to produce the Virgin Global Challenger website — the official digital home of Branson’s solo round-the-world balloon attempt. It was very early days for the internet, Content Management Systems were not a thing, Internet Explorer 6 had just launched and Nathan found himself responsible for building, maintaining and evolving a site that attracted millions of visits.

Over the following years ODB (later rebranded ‘Designation’) became a well regarded creative solutions provider, producing interactive work for clients such as De La Rue, Nortel, Agfa and Yellow Pages. Oen of Nathan’s lasting memories from his time with Designation was the design and development of the Cubeez website, built entirely in Macromedia Flash, it was truly groundbreaking and went on to receive positive industry acclaim for its thoughtful, child-centred design.

A stint at TMB Marketing & Communications followed Designation, this sharpened Nathan’s motion design skills through tools like Macromedia Flash and Adobe After Effects and exposed him to IDEs such as Macromedia Dreamweaver and server side programming using Classic ASP.

During this time Nathan became involved with Macromedia as an evangelist, working with the Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash software teams as an Alpha tester and developing his own add-ons through their Extensions architecture.

At Mirashade Nathan pushed further into programming with Macromedia Director (Lingo!) and became familiar with the LAMP stack — working on in house Content Manegement Systems and building a bespoke Learning Management System from the ground up. After Mirashade, a brief but formative spell as Head of New Media at Bite CP did exactly what it said on the tin: it convinced him it was to leave and start something of his own.

In 2005 Nathan founded Nine Four Ltd, a small boutique digital media agency he established, ran and eventually sold after nearly a decade. The agency took on projects ranging from complex web platforms to brand identity, and it was through Nine Four that Nathan first became involved with iHasco — a workplace eLearning business that would go on to define the next chapter of his career.

Joining iHasco full-time in 2015 as Creative & Technical Director, Nathan spent five years shaping the product’s design, technology and content direction. In 2020 he played a pivotal role in the sale of iHASCO to The Citation Group, before stepping up as Managing Director to lead the business through its next phase of growth. This period also gave Nathan something relatively rare for someone coming from a creative bacground: a buy-side seat at the table, as he worked with the M&A team at Citation Group to acquire a number of eLearning businesses.

Now Managing Director of Citation Group’s eLearning Division, Nathan is responsible for the iHasco, Careskills and Flexebee eLearning businesses collectively. However, ask him what gets him out of bed in the morning and the answer hasn’t changed much since 1997 — making things beautifully simple.

He lives and works in Bracknell, Berkshire, UK.