Creative Lives: Brendan Dawes, artist and designer

Creative Lives

This week we talk to Manchester-based artist and designer Brendan Dawes. Rooted in universal themes, Brendan’s work often takes the form of interactive installations, exploring both digital and analogue worlds – with projects including mini sms printing machines, to a bot that generates tangible creatures from live tweets. We hear how he left school at 16, going on to work as a photographer at a news agency and at a factory, before eventually joining a Burnley-based web design company in 1996, where he became art director within a year. There, he became art director within a year, but went on to co-found his own digital design studio, Magnetic North, in 2000. Over the next 10 years, he helped grow his team from three people to over twenty, creating digital work for BBC, Diesel, Coca-Cola, Kellogg's, Astra Zeneca, Channel 4, The Tate and Sony Brendan went his own way as an artist and designer five years ago, and has since collaborated with clients such as Airbnb, Google and Twitter, and even has artwork featured in the permanent collection of New York's Museum of Modern Art. He discusses his biggest learnings, and why pushing yourself to share your work with the world – constantly – reaps the greatest rewards. Lecture in Progress is made possible by the support of a number of brand patrons – they include GF Smith, Squarespace and The Paul Smith Foundation. This episode was recorded on October 6th at Something Good design festival in Bristol. It was presented by Indi Davies and the producer was Ivor Manly. Check out lectureinprogress.com for more details.