Dave did a Foundation year at Ravensbourne College before going on to do Graphic Design at St Martin's where I met him in First Year Graphics. We later shared a house behind Olympia with others during the last 2 years of art school and beyond. Dave got lumbered very early by helping out with trace and paint for the 10 minute IBM cartoon that I was working on during the last year of art school.

While at St Martins Dave had been doing part time back-stage work for theatres and after leaving Art School this became full on. Dave got a reputation within the Theatre world and worked for many Theatres and many productions including "Fiddler on the Roof" and "The Ruling Class" amongst many others.

Although I knew Dave was doing Theatre work on "The Canterbury Tales" at the Phoenix Theatre I didn't have a grasp on his exalted status in that world ! I later discovered that on the day I phoned him in 1970 asking to give us "a bit of time" he had been offered the job of set designer at "The Young Vic" ! The reason we managed to grab his time was because we were offering more dosh. Who would have thought !

That "bit of time" stretched in the end to about 14 years ! When Dave started at Slough he and John realised that they had known each other at Ravensbourne.

Dave handled large amounts of work for clients such as Visnews, Colour Film Services, Universal Labs and Info Film, dealing directly with the client and running complete jobs. From 1978 onwards Dave worked mostly on Norwegian North Sea Oil projects.

It was Dave's plaintive cry of "what we need is a computer for this stuff" which led in 1979 to his extensive research to establish what was available at the time. He eventually focussed on and recommended a particular combination of hardware and 3D software. In 1980 the studio had already purchased this system but installation had to be put on hold until H2G2 was completed. A strange situation because if we had been a little earlier and had time to learn how to use it this would have been brilliant for the H2G2 motion graphics.

Along with John, Dave kept the other work of the studio going while Hitch Hiker's was going through. In addition to this Dave contributed large amounts of time and effort to help out with the inevitable slave labour needed for Hitch Hikers. The highly technical explanation of how to afford the huge cost of a meal at Milliways was Dave's, as were the erogenous zones of Eccentrica Gollumbitz.

When Rod shrunk Pearce Studios Ltd to a one-man-band in 1984-85 Dave took over most of the studio space at Athos House and continued to operate from there for some time in his own right. He was still travelling back and forth to Norway until 1999.

Later Dave was involved with getting an innovative business venture up and running and later returned to design work.