About me
Jim's career in digital goes back to 1997, when he sold a student project to MTV. The following year, he co-founded Large, a digital agency that Seth Godin said was one of 500 companies in the world that could make their clients remarkable. Large was acquired by Story Worldwide in 2009, where Jim was a partner until 2012.
His book, 100 Ideas that Changed the Web, was published by Lawrence King in 2014. The same year, he curated the historical section of the Barbican exhibition, Digital Revolution, which toured globally. He then joined Aesop Agency as Digital Director on a three-month contract and stayed for five years.
Now based at Here East in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, he shares his time between brand consultancy and projects that document the birth of the Information Age. In 2024, his Unsung Heroes of the Information Age comics were acquired by the V&A museum.
Brand Consultancy
Jim is a partner at Inqdrop, a specialist naming agency, underpinned by their proprietary NameDek® methodology, a comprehensive, naming-in-a-box solution. NameDek® is both a card-based workshop tool and an online platform, enabling brands to independently create effective brand names.
To complement, NameDek®, Inqdrop developed LogoDek®, a logo-generation tool that leverages machine-learning techniques to produce professional-quality wordmarks.
Digital Archaeology
Jim's Digital Archaeology work has been the centre point of Internet Week, both in London and New York, attracting keynote presentations by the British Library and the Library of Congress, and sponsorship from Google.
In 2013, his exhibition of Web 1.0 websites was visited by the team at CERN responsible for archiving the first website. The exhibition has toured globally as part of the Barbican's hugely successful Digital Revolution exhibition and is now run in partnership with the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, UK.
Jim has worked with a number of computer artists to reverse engineer historical generative algorithms. In 2022, together with Professor Philip Lewis, he helped Ken Knowlton create Studies in Perception IV: Julie Martin, using the algorithm Ken developed in 1966 to create Studies in Perception I: Computer Nude.
Writer
100 Ideas that Changed the Web An accessible guide to the history of the web, published by Laurence King. Described by Maria Popova of The Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings, as "wonderfully illuminating in its entirety".
Jim's comic book series, Unsung Heroes of the Information Age, tells the stories of marginalised figures in the history of computing and was recently acquired by the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Speaker
Jim has spoken about digital preservation at the Library of Congress, shared the stage with Tim Berners-Lee at the Southbank's Web We Want festival and had his digital archaeology software exhibited at the Tate Modern.