Skip navigation.

Who is this Phil Oye character anyway?

I’m a slightly sarcastic guy with a passion for design. I live in the East Village of New York City Sydney, Australia, read a lot, and travel when I can.

I have a lovely wife, Jeni and a fantastic son, Simon.

I co-founded a web design firm in New York called Moment in 2002, and when I moved to Sydney, I started Moment Australia. I love doing work that makes a brand shine, a business thrive, and a user smile.

Other than this page, I have not updated this site in more that three years. At some point I’ll get around to overhauling it, but in the meantime, you keep up with me Twitter, but only if you are bored or like a good rant.

Me in a cab

Where am I from?

So I'm often asked: “Where are you from?”. You tell me, I can’t decide:

  • 1974 Born in Tokyo, Japan. And no, my father wasn’t in the military, he was a CPA, who apparently travel as much as the military.
  • 1975 Moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In one of life’s cruel tricks, I lived on the beach in Rio before I was really conscious.
  • 1976 Moved to White Plains (outside New York City). My memories begin with suburbia.
  • 1982 Moved to Mexico City, Mexico and experienced a real earthquake—8.1 on the Richter scale.
  • 1987 Moved just outside Baltimore, Maryland. Some call Maryland “The Land of Pleasant Living”, I call it “The Land of Humidity”.
  • 1992 Went to college at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, PA. The school everyone loves to hate.
  • 1996 After graduation, I moved to Boston to work at a speech recognition startup called PureSpeech. Don’t look for it as it is long gone.
  • 1996 Moved back to Pittsburgh to work at MAYA. Which means that MAYA must have been pretty cool for me to abandon Boston in favor of Pittsburgh.
  • 1999 Moved to New York City to work at Studio Archetype, and well, because it is NYC.
  • 2006 Moved to Sydney, Australia, after seven great years in NYC.
  • Today I ask you, where am I from?