My introduction into design, that is design with a structured approach, started at Sheffield Hallam University way back in 1995, where I studied product design. It taught me various skills, including Ergonomics, Customer focused design, materials technology through to basic skills such as marker visualization, schematics and technical drawing.
This education fed a desire to work in a creative industry, however my route did not follow my training. Instead after leaving college a difficult year finding work forced me to innovate and set up a small [one man] graphic design service. This taught me basic commercial survival skills, all the while still searching for a position within a design conscious manufacturing company.
The opportunity never materialized, but what did happen would irreversibly change my approach to design. In the early 90’s a small computer games development company called Codemasters took me on. Other than some tinkering on the Commodore 64 in my youth, computer games were something I knew little about. However they were keen to train me, and saw merit in my traditional design skills. It was here that I was formally introduced to the power of computers.
My first projects were developed for the Mega Drive; Micro Machines, I doubt many people will remember this, but if you imagine using a palette of 16 colours, two of which must be black and white, one must be transparency, you can imagine the skills needed to create anything other than a scrawl.
Move forward a year and we saw a revolution in gaming with the introduction of the Playstation [the first one!]. Full 3d rendering, lighting, textured and shaded polygons, real animation and video playback. With a leap in hardware technology saw an associated leap with the software to develop the games.
This saw my first introduction to 3d modelling and animation. Enter Autodesk 3d Studio, and subsequently 3d Studio Max 1. The first time we booted it up and I sat in front of the monitor I thought, “this is what it must feel like to try and learn Russian”. It was a painful learning curve, and even though I used it for generating art content on TOCA Touring Cars and Colin McRae Rally I didn’t fully understand the power of 3d until I moved onto another small games company called Psygnosis.
By the time I had my feet under the table at Psygnosis [Now SONY Liverpool] there were already tremors within the industry, resonating around the huge bubble of expansion the games industry had undergone in the last few years, the spiralling marketing budgets and tiers of expensive middle management. Many of the titles we worked on, some nearing completion, were unceremoniously shelved with all the associated human costs that brought.
My first experience from the fallout of this was when we turned up for work one morning at Hangar Lane [Oh the glamour of games] and on the boardroom desk half of the seats had in front of them white envelopes. Those that were asked to sit in these chairs opened the envelopes to find they had been made redundant. No best practice then or rights for employees, just thank you and goodnight. This was a recurring theme within the industry over the next few years, no studio or company was immune, not even the mighty Psygnosis, jewel in the development crown of SONY. I recall the day our studio was shut, people were strolling out with everything apart from the toilet seats.
Following Psygnosis' demise, I moved to a small but well renowned little development company called the Bitmap Brothers. Responsible for such classics as Speedball, Xenon, Chaos Engine and Z they were on a downward arc with the move from 2D isometric games into the realms of full 3D development. Both Z "Steel Soldiers" and Front-line Command suffered badly from feature creep, and the sheer pressure of developing for a moving target, in this case PC, put a great deal of strain on the overstretched code resource. The catastrophically bad Speedball 2100 [Their first and last PS1 title] developed out of house was the final nail in the coffin and signalled the demise of this legendary studio.
Where to go from here? Well initially I set up a small two man team with one of my colleagues from the Bitmap Brothers, John Kershaw, to supply art content for development companies. Our first large contract was for Hutchison Wampoa [now 3 mobile] and was a small mobile platform game in the same vein as the early Bitmap games. Ironically this nearly finished our small endeavour as, even though it was a months work, it took 3 months and 40 signatures to get paid!
For the next few years we developed mobile games for Fremantle media, including I'm a Celebrity, Family Fortunes, Blockbusters, The Price is Right and Sale of the Century, while also working on our own IP. It seemed like a lucky break but as a young developer we were tied into a royalties only deal that saw our company take all the risk, and the various operators take all the revenue. My fellow directors wouldn't agree on the changes I wanted to take place in order to wrestle some control back, so reluctantly we split the company and I walked away from the mobile development side to concentrate on my own freelance enterprise. This change in tack brought me to where I am today, a move I consider as more of a sideways step than a total change in direction.
Ironically I still do many, if not all of the things I used to do and more; from motion graphics, visualisation and CGi, through to mobile and web development. It is a fast moving environment and I relish the fact that I can be visualising a POS display stand Virgin Media one day or working on a game for Subaru the next. I still manage to find time working within a small iPhone development team in my spare time, developing
my own range of loudspeakers, and help parenting my beautiful daughter.
In many ways I'm glad that I didn't get that early opportunity to specialise solely in product design, I think I would be a poorer designer for it, and wouldn't have enjoyed many of the opportunities within my career that I've had to date.
