This is the personal site of me, Brendan Dawes. I suppose I’m an interactive designer but mostly I just like to make things. It just so happens that most of my making involves computers and code. I work as creative director for mN, an interactive design company based in Manchester, UK. The site you’re on now is my own personal playground; a place where I publish the occasional personal project such as Cinema Redux but more generally a space to disappear into and waste some time.
Beeps, zaps and player one up
I suppose my passion for all this interaction / computer / digital stuff started like many people with video games, in my case very early arcade machines. Living in a seaside holiday town meant I had a load of video arcades to choose from, but there was one particular one where I spent all my time and money.
This arcade was actually part of a hotel, but it was a real hardcore gamers paradise. No fruit machines or any of that crap (which cut down on the scallies asking “can I have your ecky man”), just pure video game heaven. The arcade itself was lit only with ultraviolet light which made for a great atmosphere when combined with the sounds of games like Tempest, Defender, Galaga and other arcade classics. It’s weird, but the music I remember most is the Human Leagues “Fascination” - it always seemed to be on the jukebox. Myself and my bessie mate Ken would spend hours in there - mostly playing Defender. I think that was one of the most physical games there was - it combined hand and eye coodination like no other. The sounds were amazing too - in fact I still think it terms of sound design that game has probably never been beaten.
Back at home I had an Atari 2600 or “woody” as they’re now known. It might seem mad now but we used to spend hours playing Space Invaders and Asteroids. And I mean 5, 6 hours at a stretch. I also remember Kaboom by Activision being another one that kept us up for hours.
My first real computer though was a Sinclair ZX81. It came with a massive 1K of RAM, but luckily I also had a 16K RAM pack! Black and white, no sound, not much graphics but it rocked. For the first time people could own a personal computer that didn’t cost the earth. What was great about the ZX81 was that it came with a book on how to program it. You had to learn to program in BASIC because there was hardly any programs available for it. Just imagine if today you got your shiny computer home to find that all it did was blink a cursor at you! I think the first thing everyone did when they started to program the ZX81 was fill the screen with a word - usually something rude and then go into the local Dixons and do the same on their demo machines. As you left the store the screens behind you would be filled with the word “knob”, “penis” or something similar. It was almost like hacking on the high street! Dixons deserve it anyway - useless bastards.
You may think with all this “cutting edge” technolgy in my life back then I would have joined the computer club at school or something. Well the thing was the computer club had one BBC micro and one Commodore Pet. Plus it was full of “A” streamers - and I definately wasn’t one of them. It was obviously felt that only the seemingly more intelligent kids were worthy enough to be taught how to use these new fangled machines. When I look back on it now, the school, in fact most schools at the time, really underestimated the impact computers were going to make.
So I never pursued a career in computing - whatever that might have been. Instead, after leaving school with one qualification - a GCSE in Art, I joined a local freelance photography agency, mostly doing news stuff. We’d scour the local papers for stories then go and do them ourselves and sell the photos and story to the local evening papers. If the story was strong enough we’d try the national newspapers as well. I did that for two years before I decided it wasn’t really for me.
Can you feel it?
Music was the next big thing in my life. I got into dj’ing and mixing, creating breakbeat albums for underground labels like Warrior Records. I remember the guy at Warrior Records had commisioned me to put a load of loops together for their next compilation album, to which he thought I was simply using a sampler and then putting that loop to tape. He got a bit of a shock when he got the tape to find each 3 minute breakbeat had been spliced together by hand! It took me hours to put five loops together, but when you did so much splicing you got a sort of feel for were the edit point was.
I was really loving the editing side of things but wanted to take it much further than my Akai reel-to-reel would allow me. Around about 1986 I signed up to do a sound engineering course in Manchester for a year. Following that I borrowed some cash off the bank and got myself a little home sequencing set-up. A Casio FZ-1 16 bit sampler, a couple of effects and a state of the art Atari 1040 st - the industry standard for MIDI sequencing. I think I spent about 3 grand - and now you can get all that and a whole lot more in one piece of software costing around $500! So now I had some serious music making power. I was going to create killer acid house tracks, oh yeah. This was it, me hitting the big time. In the end what actually happened was I released a couple of 12 inch singles on the 3 Beat label, did a few gigs and then got ditched. The music biz is tough.
After my idea of becoming the next Jean Michelle Jarre didn’t exactly pan out I needed some money to live. So I ended up working in an electronics factory for eight years, literally drilling holes in fibreglass, making printed circuit boards. There’s nothing like a shit boring, mind numbing job to really focus the mind. Mine was focused on getting out of there.
Welcome to Macintosh
One day I was round at my mum and dad’s when my dad showed me his new laptop computer. It was a Macintosh 180c. Using that Mac for the first time was like some kind of epiphanal moment. Think John Belushi somersaulting down the aisle in the church and you get the idea. I know it’s sad but that’s how It was. The Mac felt like a wholly different user experience. It was about making stuff. It wasn’t about numbers or speed or anything like that. It was just beautful to use. And it had this thing called Adobe Photoshop.
I then got pretty much addicted to that program, downloading all of Kai’s Power Tips on this new fangled thing called the web. As I’ve always been into taking things apart and seeing how they work I wanted to know how to make web sites. So I set about looking at the source code of these very early sites - this was back in the day when you couldn’t even center text - and html tables hadn’t even been invented! Eventually I created a site all about the original Outer Limits TV series, mainly because there wasn’t anyone else doing it at the time. I look back on it now and it’s full of crap design, but back then having lots of beveled buttons was very cool - honest.
Eventually I started to use the site as a bit of a showcase for what I could do - and landed a job with a web design company called Subnet in 1996. I loved it and I loved the people there. It was just a group of lads who were into this web thing and decided to have a go at making a business from it - and have a laugh in the process. We winged it big style, but thankfully a lot of our work was pretty damn good. So much so that we ended up working for clients like Disney, Fox Kids, Club 18-30 using a lot of Flash and Shockwave. I was finally doing something that I really loved. But after 4 fantastic years I decided it was time to move on.
Just before I left I started a site called Saul Bass on the Web - a homage to graphic design legend Saul Bass. I also then created a little Flash 4 application that allowed you to edit together your own version of the Psycho shower scene. Both those things got written about a lot. After seeing Hillman Curtis speak in Paris at a Macromedia conference back in 1999 knowing that he was a fan of Saul Bass, I emailed him about the Psycho Studio app to get his opinion. Eventually we started chatting till one day out of the blue he asked me if I wanted to join him on stage at Macromedia Web World in Seattle and talk about the Saul Bass site. Of course I said yeah!
On that Seattle trip back in 2000 I got approached by a publishing company called Friends of Ed who were actually based in Birmingham. They were putting together a book called “New Masters of Flash” and wondered if I would be interested in writing a chapter for it. I was also asked by New Riders if I would be interested in writing a book on Dreamweaver extensions (which I was into at the time). Eventually that book was dropped and I ended up writing “Drag Slide Fade - Flash Actionscript for Designers“.
After getting back from Seattle I was then approached by magneticNorth to be their Creative Director. It was a great opportunity and one that I jumped at. That’s where I remain, loving this thing called interaction design, exploring new stuff and learning new things everyday. As I get older though I feel the need to cause more trouble and shake things up. This site, the experiments, the mistakes, the rants and the confessions provide me with a canvas to stir things up a little bit.
My teacher once told me never to run with scissors. Now I realise that running with scissors is far more interesting than simply using them to cut things with.