Featured Member - Ben Haddock
www.benhaddock.co.uk
www.pelime.com/benhaddock
Ben Haddock is an interactive designer with Manchester-based digital agency Code Computerlove.
Q. What do you think makes good design?
A. Smart and engaging ideas make good design. Pretty words and pictures bring it to life but without a solid concept or a reason to be, a design will ultimately be less interesting or useful.
Q. What benefits does digital and interactive design present as opposed to other forms of design?
A. Comparing it to print (which is what my background and education are rooted in), interactive design can be much more engaging and more receptive to its audience. Users can influence, manipulate and share content at their whim and interactive design can accommodate and respond to that. This creates a rapidly changing and evolving platform, which is exciting!
Q. You designed a portfolio in the style of a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ type story. What inspired this?
A. In promoting myself through a portfolio I wanted to focus on my love of both designing and writing. I’ve also got an obsessive passion for video games, so the gaming elements in the Choose Your Own Adventure type stories caught my eye. Writing a narrative structured like one of these stories would give my writing chops a serious challenge while also appeasing my heartfelt interest in games.
I also just wanted to create something fun and interesting to use, atypical to the usual creative portfolio.
Q. You do digital design work for various brands. How much freedom do you have to take the project in a certain direction?
A. It depends entirely on the brief and what the goals of the project are. In some cases I’ve had a lot of freedom to push the design and art direction of projects which is really fun. This is also true of pitches, where you’re often quite free to go big and wild with your ideas.
Q. In what ways are the world of digital and interactive design changing right now? What should we be on the lookout for?
A. The rising popularity and population of tablets and mobile devices is a big thing, as they present new platforms and opportunities to create work and communicate to users with. This is true for the umpteen social sites around too — each present possible new ways and methods of executing your ideas.
Q. Is there any particular dream project for you?
A. Creating a video game — or at least having some involvement in it from my non-gaming design background, would be a treat. We actually came close to this at Code Computerlove, and it was really, really fun.
Q. Which work are you most pleased with and why?
A. One of the projects I’m most pleased with is Stodge Podge. This is a lunch event where creative industry types come together to meet, greet and eat. We (myself and a team at where I work) branded the event and created the website and printed bits. I art directed the printed bits and wrote copy across the whole project and it was great fun (and a huge team effort) to create and develop an 8-bit gaming theme to run across everything. The resulting work looks great, and it was really well received.
Q. Which work has proven the most difficult and why?
A. From a personal standpoint, my portfolio is definitely a labour of love. Working on random evenings and weekends over a few months certainly didn’t help, but my main challenge was the story and the writing behind it. I don’t write as often as I’d like or should, so at times I found this particularly challenging, especially as it forms a key part of my portfolio, so I wanted and needed to ensure it was the best as I could make it.
