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Why wayouteast?

- is there a reason?

I'm sometimes asked why my personal site is called 'wayouteast' rather than 'jondixon.co.uk' (actually, there is a 'jondixon.co.uk' too, but it's a bit of a 'work in progress' at the moment).

The genesis of the name lies in my first faltering steps into the world of computer graphics and multimedia back in the early 90's. I was approached by an old friend, Tony Armatrading (who I'd first met on 'Angels' for the BBC). He had recently stared up his own new media company with another friend, Ian Embleton (now CEO of Digiquest, an interactive TV games company), and was wondering if I would like to do some freelance graphic work for them. I was VERY out-of-work at the time, so I jumped at the chance, and went to London for a couple of months to work for him. The company's name was 'Way Out West'. As I was in Derby, another of their freelance people was on the south coast, the company was in London and we had some bright idea of 'telecommuting' we set up four domains - 'wayoutwest' was the main office, I was 'wayouteast' and there was also a 'waydownsouth' and a 'wayupnorth' (never used as far as I'm aware - perhaps we would have been forced to have employed someone in Scotland just to use the name!).

Among the clients that I worked for while I was at Way Out West were:

Price Waterhouse - electronic corporate presentations
CPI - graphics, electronic presentations and training aids. Logos.
Linda LaPlante's 'Killer Net' (TV drama series) - some screensavers, game graphics and titles

When the company finally disbanded I took the name with me, and my personal site has been 'wayouteast' ever since (but only in the uk domain - 'wayouteast.com' seems to be some company that organises parties in Hong Kong)!