Interview: Noughts and Ones senior designer, Matt Campbell
As part of our commitment to elevate creative voices we are speaking to members to our community. We will be celebrating their work and sharing their story because we think it’s important to champion the people that make our sector so damn good! In this edition we are joined by Noughts and Ones senior designer, Matt Campbell.
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What first got you interested in a career in design?
I've always been a creative person, but grew up focusing mostly on music, specifically playing guitar and piano. Once I realised that making money from music is an impossible mountain to climb, I started leaning towards a career in VFX for film.
After making a few rubbish Star Wars videos with lightsabers and lightning effects as an 11-year-old, I shifted towards branding and website design as the years progressed when I realised that there's a lot more demand for these types of skills at the grassroots level.
Who were your earliest influences?
My earliest influences were all amazing creatives from Bristol, which helped steer me in my decision to move to the city. Nathan Riley and Jess Caddick from Unseen Studio (previously Green Chameleon), Joel Rosen and Max Harding from Orca, and the entire branding and digital teams at Fiasco Design. Currently, the two agencies that I think are killing it at the moment have to be Ragged Edge and How&How.
How did you enter the industry?
After graduating from the University of Worcester, I moved to Bristol and began looking for work as a Graphic Designer. After a few failed interviews for uncreative businesses that just needed 'a designer', I eventually found work as the first hire at a brand-new website design agency based just outside of Bristol.
It was there I cut my teeth and picked up a wide variety of new skills, including branding, website design, website development, and other skills that I picked up passively, such as SEO and digital marketing strategy.
On a day–to–day basis, what does an average day look like for you
As the Senior Designer at Noughts & Ones, my day is split up into a combination of team meetings and internal comms (10%), website design and concept creation (70%), and quality assurance of the Shopify websites that our team of developers work on (20%).
It's a really good split, with most of my time being spent creatively while still allowing me enough time to take a step back and get a good overview of the role the design department plays in the context of the wider view of the agency.
Does anything outside of your niche inspire you?
While I'm very much a designer by name and trade, I do have experience in website development, and it's often here that I end up being inspired and learning the most from other people.
Looking at some of the work that developers produce, particularly when it comes to animation and interactive effects, can really help breathe new life into the design process and help elevate digital designs from being something static and boring into something that feels much more alive and engaging.
Outside of the design industry entirely, I'm still constantly inspired by the visual and audio work that goes into filmmaking, particularly the visual effects produced by the team at DNEG, and some of the scores created by industry giants such as Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino, Ramin Djawadi and Ludwig Göransson.
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What are your short and long–term ambitions?
Currently, I'm looking at doing some deep-diving into digital design systems and how they can be best utilised to ensure that website designs are more scalable, flexible and usable by larger teams.
In the long-term, our aim is to embed this design system into our own custom 'super-eco' Shopify theme to speed up how quickly we're able to develop online stores that share common functionality across them all.
In theory, this should help us cut down on the time we need to spend on each project, which in turn cuts down on the amount of energy we need to end up using too. Everything we do at our agency is done so with sustainability in mind, and each of these decisions have helped form the basis of our very own Conscious Development™ Framework.
Is there a client or project you’ve worked on that stands?
We've just launched a brand new Shopify store for Grace & Green, and it was great to work with another client that is as focused on both people and the planet as our own agency is.
The new website is the culmination of months' worth of hard work from everyone involved on our side and was guided by an unwavering vision from the client along every step of the way. The design, written copy and photography all work together really well to effectively communicate to the brand's target audience that ethical period care should be available for every body - without exception and without compromise.
Are there any brands you’d really like to work with?
At Noughts & Ones, we're really fortunate in that we've had the opportunity to work with some of our favourite brands already, particularly in the sustainability space. We've helped people right at the beginning of their sustainability journey, businesses who have already achieved B Corp certification, and have even worked with businesses who have ended up securing investment on Dragons' Den.
While there are a lot of businesses out there who are already doing an amazing job at working in a sustainable way, we're just as keen to work with good businesses led by good people who are yet to take that first step into working in a more ethical way. With that being said, I'm an absolute sucker for alcohol and beverage brands, and working with even more craft beer businesses on a regular basis would be a dream come true.
What advice would you give to yourself if starting out again?
Spend more time looking at the strategy that goes into the work that other agencies produce, and far less on the final outcome. It's so easy as a designer to focus solely on how pretty something looks, without actually taking the time to think about why that outcome was reached.
Research and brand strategy is something that should steer every decision that is made during the design process, and jumping straight into the concept visualisation without actually doing the research beforehand means that there's a good chance that everything you create is doomed to fail from the offset.
Finally, what would you like to see the industry do better?
Transparency across the board. I'm sick to death of seeing agencies promote how great their culture is across every social media platform while simultaneously offering sub-par benefits and failing to reveal salary ranges when it's time to hire new staff.
In my eyes, a "competitive salary" just translates to "as little as we can justify", and a positive working culture should be the bare minimum an agency offers, not an exclusive benefit of working there. Initiatives such as B Corp have really helped steer businesses in the right direction in this regard.
A lot of people think that becoming B Corp certified is just about making sure you're recycling at work, but it's so much more than that. It's about ensuring that your business is run ethically from the ground up, including how the people that work there are looked after and nurtured throughout their careers.
For more about Noughts & Ones visit: www.noughtsandones.com or to watch their workshop exploring the processes behind their approach to digital sustainability visit this page.
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