Brendan Dawes is a UK based digital artist, designer, author and maker.
Ever since his first experiences with the humble ZX81 back in the early eighties, Brendan has continued to explore the interplay of people, code, design and art through his work and on brendandawes.com, a personal space where he publishes ideas, toys and projects created from an eclectic mix of digital and analog objects.
For eleven years he was the Creative Director of magneticNorth, leading the team there to realise digital design solutions for clients that included BBC, Diesel, Reuters, Astra Zeneca, Kellogs, Fox Kids, Channel 4, Arup and Coca-Cola.
In 2009 he was listed among the top twenty web designers in the world by .Net magazine and was featured in the "Design Icon" series in Computer Arts. In 2011, after winning a D&AD award in interface design, his Doodlebuzz news interface was featured in the Talk to Me exhibition at MoMA in New York.
In 2010 he released The Accidental News Explorer - an iPhone app for serendipitous news discovery that was featured as “new and notable” in the US app store and was featured amongst the eighty projects in the Taschen book Mobile Case Studies published in 2011.
Three of Brendan's most famous pieces of work are born from his on-going love affair with film. The Webby nominated "Psycho Studio", created in 1998, was one of the very first video editors created in Flash and allowed people to re-cut their own version of the infamous shower scene from Psycho. "Saul Bass on the Web" is an online homage to the father of film titles, the graphic design legend Saul Bass and has been featured in many books on interface design. Cinema Redux attempts to distill whole movies down to a single image using specially written software that samples a single frame of a movie every second. In 2008 Cinema Redux was acquired by MoMA in New York for the permanent collection after appearing in the exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind.
His blog Everything I Make With My Makerbot chronicles his adventures and experiments with his Makerbot 3D printer and has been featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, The Atlantic, The Sunday Telegraph and Core77.com
In 2011 he co-founded Beep Industries where he created two physical products – MoviePeg and Popa.
Never Ready
Designer? Developer? Maker? Who cares? More and more it's getting harder to describe someone who makes things in the 21st Century. To Brendan Dawes a modern day designer can be equally comfortable creating a CRON job on the server as easily as creating a baseline grid. In this session Brendan Dawes takes you through his approach to making things; things made for himself as well as things made for clients, often sharing the same question – "how the hell am I going to make that?" From hardware to software and everything in-between Brendan shows how curiosity and a thirst to learn new things drives him on to became a better maker of things.
