Daniel Diggle Interview

London’s got talent! After finished reading Erin Kissane’s article about writing effective web copy, I was reminded of the net-interview I sent to Daniel. He emits his creative waves through his minimalist, typographically advanced website, appealing illustrations, and snappin’ web copy that tucks itself into every nook and cranny of your head. Lets face it, far too many freelancers / web companies portray themselves as companies run by robots, androids, droids, and more robots. It’s relieving to come across a website that actually looks like a human runs it. So rule of the day: read Erin’s article and write copy that won’t bore people. Anyway, to the interview!

Ocular Harmony: Let’s start with the basics. Can you provide a little about yourself, what you do, and where you’re from?

Daniel: I originally hail from a town called Harlow, just outside London, but have been living within London since 2006.

I work mainly as a web designer; creating anything from large .com’s to rich interactive flash driven sites. I’ve also dabbled in some writing, motion graphics, animation and currently, illustration.

Looking through your portfolio, you branch your creative energy into many areas: web, motion, illustration, print, and digital advertising. Do you have any preference in the creation of any of these topics?

Illustration is where my heart lies, I made a conscious decision years ago not to pursue it as a career, though this was based on the disbelief that it could be a sustainable career choice. I’ve recently taken it up again and am starting to reconsider my earlier opinion. Web, animation, print are all great in varied amounts. Digital advertising is something I did once, my first job was working for Glue London, one of the best digital advertising agencies in the world, it was a great learning environment, but one I would not want to go back to.

You use plenty of both digital and traditional mediums. Do you integrate them together more often, or do you like keeping them two separate entities? Or is it ‘go with what makes it look better’?

I’d say it’s a matter of what best suits the bill. Generally, everything could in theory be done with the computer, but the process and experience of creating certain pieces by hand puts an emotional, tactile feel into the work that you can’t easily replicate digitally.

Are all your character development pictures hand drawn before getting the digital treatment? What’s the process of making them?

Most of my character work is analogue to start. Pencil sketches first, then clean inked pen lines. After that the image is scanned in and colouring added via Photoshop and the like. If I ever choose to further my character illustrations then working more digitally would probably be better; using illustrator to ‘ink’ the sketches would make the final image far more flexibe than a resolution static scan.

Has to be asked - how tired were your hands after drawing ‘Random got Beautiful’? And how long did this one take?

This was what I like to think of as my first illustration ever, character work was simply doodling, but RGB was my first ever attempt straight off the bat, to create something meaningful. It took quite a long time, but just doing a few hours here and there means I’m not entirely sure how much time was actually spent working on it. It was started in October 2007 and finished a month and a half later.
**Authors note: Random Got Beautiful is a website that displays square images filtered by color in a gridded format, providing color harmony in the big picture. Uh, and only now do I understand that it abbreviates to RGB (doh!).

How long have you been experimenting with pointillism and stippling?

I came across it quite randomly, I did a digital portrait of a friend in the classic ‘pop art’ style in 2004 and that was the first time I though of using points or dots to define colour, I then applied a tattoo like idea to character illustrations just after, the vaguely define shadows (as can be seen in the Lipside characters), it was after this that I considered using it to define more advanced shapes and lighting. Finally I found reference for the style via old Victorian engravings and botanical illustrations that partially inspired me to keep working with the style.

With U-Dox Creative you participated in creating projects for Adidas and Footlocker. Are there any images of these you can (legally) disclose from the work you did there?

Haha! This is a tricky one, until recently all of my Adidas and footlocker work was still in my portfolio, but some disagreements with my previous agency led to them demanding it be taken out of my portfolio. This was based on my honest appraisel of how they executed the final designs I had created. In other words, I pointed out I did not endorse the final builds if the sites as they were buggy and should have been fixed by the agency. They didnt take kindly to my honesty!

You can visit Daniel’s website at danieldiggle.com. All photos courtesy of danieldiggle.com and http://www.behance.net/DanielDiggle.

Related posts:

1. Designing a logo from scratch part 2: drawing and illustrating
2. 22/12/2008
3. Half Gentleman, Not Beasts