Simon Espley

Simon is a chartered accountant and past director of various companies in the finance and media industries. After raising capital for bigFIG’s early stages and playing the part-time role of interim CEO during the crucial first 2 years, Simon decided to jump on board full-time in late 2009. Simon explains, ‘The opportunity was too good to miss, I know a winning team and business model when I see it.’ Simon is an active conservationist in his personal capacity, serving as trustee/director of various successful conservation projects. He is a luminary of the WWF One Planet Leader program and a committed sustainable lifestyle advocate who practises what he preaches. See him on LinkedIn.

Peter Borchert

Peter has a publishing career spanning 40 years and hundreds of books and magazines. In 1992 he turned his back on the corporate world (he was CEO of a book publishing company) and founded the award winning magazines Africa Geographic and Africa – Birds & Birding. Peter has regularly spoken at conferences, is a widely respected commentator on conservation and global issues, and has an extensive network within the global NGO industry.

Steve Boyes

Steve has a PhD in Zoology and has presented at the Universities of California (Berkeley), Oxford, Cambridge, Colorado and Cornell. He is widely published in scientific literature and popular media. Steve has worked as a biodiversity consultant, wilderness guide and environmentalist and spends as much time as possible in remote wilderness areas. He says, ‘Combining the huge business opportunity of pioneering carbon-friendly digital media with my passion for the environment is very exciting. We’re surfing the front of this wave and it is totally enthralling, a real buzz.’

Harriet Nimmo

Having spent all her free time and money travelling round Africa for the past 20 years, Harriet has finally jumped ship and left Blighty to join bigFIG as Commercial Director. Here her role is to build corporate partnerships and develop revenue streams for bigFIG’s exciting portfolio of digital magazines. Previously she was CEO of Wildscreen - delivering the internationally renowned wildlife and environmental film festival, the WildPhotos nature photography symposium as well as being responsible for developing the award winning www.ARKive.org – the world’s digital databank of film and photos of endangered species.

Shelley Prince

Shelley began her career in advertising as a traffic manager, but her passion for the outdoors soon drove her to the multiple-award-winning print publishing arm of Africa Geographic as traffic manager and personal assistant to the directors. After 12 happy years with Africa Geographic, Shelley made the move to digital media at the same time as Africa Geographic outsourced its digital magazine production contract to bigFIG. Shelley has a well-earned reputation for production efficiency – her busy style and no-nonsense manner has earned her the nickname The Bulldog among her colleagues at bigFIG. No surprise then to find that Shelley runs marathons in her spare time. Her role as sustainability manager gives her a great sense of fulfillment and enjoyment. Her eye for detail is a great advantage in the multi-layered approach required by any business in the drive for true sustainable status.

Paul Steyn

Paul grew up in the hustle and bustle of Johannesburg in South Africa and often found solace retreating into the vast wilderness areas of Africa. After studying Media in Cape Town for 4 years, his brooding enthusiasm for the bush resulted in a brief career guiding guests through the Big-Five game reserves of Mpumalanga for &Beyond – one of Africa’s most luxurious game lodge groups. He then needed to get back to a normal life and, after working in online news publishing for a time, he decided to combine his passion for wildlife, writing and digital media by joining the bigFIG team.

Holly Meadows

Holly was born and raised in the rural British Counties, her mother began life on a sugar farm in Zululand. After reading Anthropology at university in London, working for a political activist filmmaker in India, and doing a short stint under the bright lights of Bollywood – she decided it was time to return to the motherland. To earn a crust in the name of wanderlust, Holly finished up a post grad in media and hotfooted around South Africa as a freelance travel journalist. Now, she's landed up in the hallways of Safari magazine.

Sean Messham

Born in scenic Cape Town, South Africa, Sean grew up enthralled by the wonders of nature. But it was while hiking in the Cederberg mountains that he discovered photography was to be his thing. So, after finishing school at Wynberg Boys' High, he trekked off to Rhodes University in Grahamstown to study photojournalism and history. Keen to get on with it after university, Sean worked at an international communications company before finding his little niche at bigFIG. Finally, a place where he can indulge his passion for the environment, photography and writing while connecting to the snapping networks of digital media.

Tim Jackson

Tim’s life is a little confused. Born in the West Indies, he grew up as a nomad traveling through much of the world before settling to a life researching wildlife in South Africa. A few years ago he was wrestled from the ivory towers of academia and dumped headlong into the world of journalism. Today he acts as a translator, spending much of his time turning the gobbledygook language of science into things most of us can actually understand. Having wielded a camera since the tender age of 8, Tim is something of a photographic geek too, and his pictures have a habit of turning up in bigFIG’s digital magazines.

Alessandro Bonora

Alessandro likes to think he could have been a great travel writer, but in truth he is far better with visuals. After studying Journalism he began a brief but doomed stint in hard news before seeing the light and opting for a career on the visual side of the creative word. Alessandro spent some time as a designer for an advertising agency in Rome, and then returned to South Africa to work as an Art Director for an award-winning conservation magazine. When bigFIG offered him the opportunity to ply his trade in interactive magazines, Alessandro jumped and has been happily skydiving ever since. He is mildly addicted to coffee and comes down to Earth every now and then for a game of cricket (he plays for Italy).

Roger Landman

Digital builder and devout follower of the Adobe Flash discipline, Roger saw the impact that electronic media had on people during 5 years in the e-learning environment. He formulated his own ideas and concepts on how technology could herald a new era in experiencing stories rather than merely being exposed to them. However, it wasn’t until Roger joined the bigFIG team that his vision finally stopped being a daydream and become his day job. Very excited to be in the right place at the right time, Roger continues his quest to perfect the ultimate storytelling platform. He is like a sponge for Design Thinking, continually researching and playing with new ideas for user-experience design and learning as much as he can along the way. In his spare time, Roger continues to pursue his passion for digital storytelling by exploring and creating web-comics. He has also begun to acknowledge that Flash might not be the only answer to all the digital world’s troubles and so he spends some time pondering life after Flash.

Gareth Campbell

Much of his early history is a mystery. It is assumed that Gareth was raised by a wild herd of spray cans. After managing to drag himself out of high school he completed his Bachelors degree at CPUT (Cape Peninsula University of Technology) and very quickly began to ply his trade in the design industry. He is a versatile designer, with a wide skill-set in many of the design disciplines that are required in today’s cut-throat industry. Gareth is always willing to work outside of his comfort zone, and never afraid to produce pearls of wisdom in times of need. He is quite well known for his smart mouth, endearing nature and excellent selection of montage music!

Simon de Haast

Simon is responsible for the customer experience at bigFIG, and because a large component of our products are digital, he is deeply involved with technology strategy. He has guest lecturered on branding and innovation strategy at Vega Brand School, Gordon Institute of Business (GIBS) MBA and the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, and has spoken at numerous conferences on innovation, mobile technology and customer insight. He is strongly influenced by writers such as Fritjof Capra, Marshall McLuhan and Tom Kelly, and would pay to work at IDEO – one of the leading design firms in the world. Since that would have been too expensive, he decided to start his own innovation and experience design firm in Cape Town, South Africa. One day a client (bigFIG) made Simon an offer he couldn’t understand, so he joined in August 2009, finding a home for his passion for media innovation and digital technology. He also moonlights as a live music photographer and is often seen lurking around on stage living vicariously through the rock bands he photographs.

Josephine Bestic

A formative background in marketing special-interest print magazines fueled Josephine’s passion for publishing, and observing the exponential growth of the digital magazine and reader/tablet market in recent years made it an easy decision to cross over from print. She says, ‘With a commitment to a completely green regime at home, the idea of producing Earth-friendly magazines makes what I do for a living more of a lifestyle than a job.’ Charged with growing the audience of bigFIG’s digimags and social communities, Josephine combines the extensive experience of her career in marketing with an intense interest in the channels and media opening up in the infinite digital arena. When not pecking away at her laptop, Josephine can be found bothering the great white sharks of False Bay in Cape Town on her longboard or looking for ‘her’ [Rufous-chested] Sparrowhawk on the mountain-bike trails around Tokai Forest.