My formal training is in engineering and apart from a couple of courses undertaken at the BBC whilst working on BBC Online projects, I am self taught in interactive design. My media experience is fairly broad having worked in tv, marketing and as a magazine photographer. I get bored easily and am not very comfortable being constrained to any singular discipline, but I see this as a positive thing. I don’t believe there is ever only one absolute creative solution to a given situation and I think gaining experience within different areas of media production adds extra resources to your creative utility belt, enabling you to consider the otherwise unconsidered.

I believe that it is useful to have a flexible approach, and treat each project individually without limiting yourself to one particular design style.

When I first started I took inspiration from a lot of designers – the usual suspects Designers Republic, David Carson but now I try not to take too much inspiration from contemporary design, though I think its inevitable that your style is affected by trends.

I have found that with experience comes the ability to think up fresh ideas and conceptualise more quickly.

Working for such a varied selection of clients means I get to learn a lot about a number of different industries and meet people from all sorts of backgrounds and disciplines.

The challenge of taking a company’s message, distilling it down to the essence of the brand and communicating it in a direct visual form I find very rewarding. And also just having the chance to make a living from being creative and doing something I would probably be doing even if I wasn’t being paid for it, is pretty good.!

In the early days the web was populated with a myriad of sites that didn’t work effectively due largely to the fact that general principals of design taken from other media such as print and broadcasting were being clumsily applied directly to the web. The web had it’s own unique set of limitations which needed to be addressed in different ways to offline media.

With the spread of broadband and a better understanding of the delivery of rich media online, many of these limitations have been lifted and we are seeing more effective examples online of the use of the web as an effective broadcast medium for video and other media rich applications.

Interactive design is, in many ways, closer to industrial design than graphic design or broadcast design – websites have users and involve interaction and are not read like magazines or passively viewed like television. With this in mind and following explorations into usability and accessibility, the web is a much saner place, though there is a danger of things swinging too far the other way, to a situation where all corporate sites start to look the same, devoid of any soul and with little to distinguish between them other than a change of logo.

Clean, functional design is my own personal style but I do also enjoy the more freeform approach of designers like Juxt Interactive and where appropriate, I will break out of the restraint of minimal functionality for a more relaxed look and feel. It’s all a question of what is appropriate for the project I am working on, the client’s brand message, their product and the market they are aiming at.

At the end of the day, I think good design emphasizes the message and the brand whilst disregarding anything that will detract from it.

Most of my work tends to take the approach of simple, clean, functionality, stripped of superfluous decoration, letting the organization of the content itself inform the visual aesthetic. I am very attracted to the Bauhaus school and it’s emphasis on the harmony struck between the beauty of the unadorned and practical aspects of the functional.

A website is without doubt a great tool for displaying your work to a wide audience and particularly useful in gaining work from overseas, but it needs to be used alongside offline promotion and direct personal contact.

Remember to look outside of the web for ideas.

For example, I take a lot of inspiration from product design and architecture – airports in particular with their functional but often aesthetically pleasing signage and information systems.

Airline baggage labels are a great example of an aesthetically pleasing yet purely functional piece of information design, in the way that they display a heap of information in a relatively small space and yet manage to look good without any attempt at decoration. The enlarged barcodes and abbreviated symbols look the way they do for purely functional reasons but they inform the design and almost by accident have visual appeal – well to me anyway…!

Important lessons….? Get your invoices in on time…!

Having www.iainclaridge.co.uk featured in the Taschen book ‘1000 Favorite Websites’

People whose work I particulary admire would include Coudal Partners, Scholz and Volkmer and Kleber. Though I don’t get to build many full flash sites I also love the work of Group 94 and Firstborn.

A great site is generally one that enables the visitor to access essential information as quickly as possible and communicates the brand effectively in a way that is appropriate to the target audience.

Good site architecture with clear sign-posting is vital and having usable pages is critical. Whilst adhering to standards and following conventions is important to a degree I don’t believe it should be at the expense of the identity or soul of the site. A lot of sites that boast about their standards compliancy are cold, uniform and indistinguishable from one another.

But also remember that content is king – it is the job of the interface to sit quietly in the background until needed – like the kind of waiters that you find in only the best restaurants.

Confusing navigation, for example hiding links beneath icons or images, or navigation bars that change their position as you move through the site are a bad idea. Having essential information like contact details buried away deep within the site is another fault commonly to be found in the sites of large organisations who really should know better.

Superfluous eye candy is a particular irritant of mine – if it doesn’t reinforce the message then leave it out.

There is sometimes a place for taking a different approach with some clients, throwing all notion of usability out of the window– take for example the Donnie Darko site designed by Hi-res. The cryptic navigation, employed on this flash based site adds to the user experience and was fully appropriate in communicating the twisted storylines of the movie.

Prematurely Aged Through Sleep Deprivation