Zarina Holmes. Creative Director (aka Doodler)
MA Design. BA Art & Design (Graphic & Advertising)
BTEC Documentary Film Making
Zarina started her career as a designer and advertising creative at agencies, before becoming creative lead and producer in publishing. She completed her MA Design at Middlesex University in London, researching on Brand Extension.
In 2001 she joined BMI Publications, where she was Creative Editor and Staff Photographer, covering industry events in Europe and Southeast Asia. She also art directed and produced travel magazines for tourism worldwide offices. Zarina also led the creative makeover of Onboard Hospitality print and online magazine, which became an opinion-leading title for travel hospitality industry. From 2008 until 2010, she was travel editor for Optimist World reporting on sustainable travel.
In 2006 Zarina co-founded a storytelling collective Sojournposse, a platform for editors and photographers to discuss about digital storytelling and multimedia. In 2010 it has been listed as “one of the top 70 influential multimedia outfit” in the US and UK by Innovative Interactivity magazine.
Since 2010 Zarina has been producing Sojournposse’s Inspiration Room project, which is a storytelling lab for creatives and journalists supported by media technologists at The London Design Festival. Zarina writes about visual storytelling for Sojournposse.com. She is also a contributing photographer to digital journalism magazine Not On The Wires, and popular dance magazine, The Ballet Bag.
Zarina regularly blogs on SWXX, a hyperlocal photography project on tradesmen and creative businesses in her neighbourhood. It’s also a great excuse for her to look at food and beautiful things.
Salina Christmas. Copywriter & Coder (aka Scribbler)
MSc Digital Anthropology. BSc English Language and Literature
BTEC Final Cut Pro & DVD Authoring
Salina started out as a newspaper reporter while waiting to graduate. Her undergraduate studies had to be extended because she had to re-sit a Sociolinguistics paper, which she failed the semester before. She saw a newspaper ad calling for reporters, thought of George Orwell and decided: that was it.
Salina is, first and foremost, a storyteller. She is interested in linear storytelling as well as the sequential format of film and video narrative. After a few years reporting on digital technology, she retrained as a web editor and front end web developer. In the age of Web 1.0, nobody had ever heard of a “web editor”. She spent almost two years in banking, looking after clients’ offshore portfolios, while building websites as a side project. Thankfully, Web 2.0 took off, and she got to build websites for a career.
In 2004, she was spotted by a rower while sparring at a taekwondo event, and was asked if she would like to cox for the HSBC rowing club. Coxing led to a short stint in rowing, a bit of amateur sculling, coxing again, and yes, quite a few regattas. Most importantly, it led to photography and the use of the visual narrative to give visibility to the community. Salina found a second love: portraiture.
She retrained again as a Digital Anthropologist at University College London. Salina spent two years between 2009 and 2011 researching a street in Brixton to examine how the emails were used by the inhabitants and the Lambeth Police to mobilise against crack dealings. The August 2011 riots meant she had to rewrite quite a few chapters for the dissertation.
She has written for The Sun Daily (Malaysia), The Journalist, Frontline Solutions Europe, Automatic Identification News (US), Clinica Medtech Intelligence, Scrip ePharma, Telecoms.com, Animal Pharm News, Against The Grain, Optimist World and The Moodie Report.
And, under the techie hat, she has written many more codes without editorial bylines (yeah, how come?) for websites, microsites and API scripts developed in HTML, CSS, Javascript, with PHP modification. The steely courage tinkering with MySQL also went without due credits save for the “Sojournposse loves Firefox and Chrome” signature at the bottom of this web page. And you can view some of Salina’s digital works here.
Salina is also the co-founder of Sojournposse, partner of The London Design Festival. She has entered a few photography competitions, has won awards on photography and web journalism, and had one photography artwork peer-reviewed for a UCL journal. She graduated from UCL in 2011 with a Merit.
Not bad for a girl who had to re-sit her Sociolinguistics paper.
