Havoc Inspired

Paul Annett is a Senior Designer at Clear Left. He’s spoken at a number of conferences about design and is the creator of the most popular magic trick on Google (Disclaimer: May not be true, but he’s near the top at least.). In this weeks episode Paul talks to me about his career to date, how the Duty Calls cartoon is him (According to Relly), and what he’s most excited about in the industry today.

Interview Transcript

Paul: My job title at Clear Left, as it’s technically written in the contract is Senior Designer. That’s not senior within the company, there’s no real hierarchy in the company other than directors and then the rest of us. It’s more senior in terms of the industry, as everyone that’s hired by Clear Left is normally senior level within the industry. So technically yes, I’m a Senior Designer.

Ryan: Ok, so how long have you been at Clear Left?

Paul: I started at Clear Left in 2006 (I think it was). The guys – Rich, Jeremy and Andy set up the company in 2005 and they basically worked from their bedrooms for a couple of months and when they set up their office in 2006. I joined them in the office as a freelancer, hiring some desk space and ended up contracting for them for pretty much most of the year, to the point where at the end of the year, one hundred percent of my work was coming from Clear Left – this was around the point where they offered me a full time job. James box and I were the first full time employees who weren’t directors.

Ryan: Right, so you have been with them pretty much right from the beginning then really?

Paul: Pretty much nearly, yeah.

Ryan: Ok, so how did you meet Jeremy, Andy and Richard; how did that relationship evolve?

Paul: I guess we had known each other online through the Brighton New Media mailing list. Not necessarily as faces to names, other than avatars – did we have avatars back in those days? I can’t really remember, but we knew each other vaguely through profile pages on the Brighton New Media (BNM) mailing lists, that kind of thing. They knew each other better than they knew me as they were very vocal and very ahead of the curve on the CSS front, so I was really learning from them in that respect from the mailing list. I would perhaps meet up with them on them occasional social event, but the web scene then in Brighton was nothing like it is now, its huge now and there are social events happening every night of the week. Back then, events were relatively few and far between. That’s how I knew them right at the start and we kind of worked together – well we now discover that Jeremy and I worked together as freelancers before we worked together at Clear Left. We didn’t know at the time, and it’s only from exchanging notes recently, that we discovered ‘Oh, I worked on this project and you worked on this project’ and that we were working on the same code and sending each other code. At the time we didn’t really know each other but now we say ‘Oh so that was you!’ But we both vow to never look back at that code as we were both learning back then and admit that we didn’t really know what we were doing at the time – so we’ll keep that just between you and I okay?

Ryan: Cool, so that’s what you’re doing now, you’re at Clear Left. So rewind a little bit and take me back to the beginning. Have you always been into design?

Paul: Yeah – I’m not formally trained as a designer, but I’ve always been into design and I’ve always been interested in how things work and working things out. I guess in 1992 when I was about fifteen or so, I was at school working on setting up and working on the community magazine and designing the first issue on an old acorn using some software on (pauses) I can’t remember what software it was on. I also, at about the same time had a part time job working on a newspaper – the local evening news in Portsmouth, basically designing classified ad’s as a side job, which beat working in a shop I guess. When I started at college in 1994, was my first exposure to Photoshop on a Mac LC2. I don’t know what version of Photoshop it was, but I remember using a black and white version on a classic – at the time, I didn’t really see the potential of it. It wasn’t really a photo manipulation tool; it was more something to draw squiggly lines on and then you could print them out through the printer – and then what did you do with it? I also did some work with Quark Express doing some desktop publishing there at college which was where I first got my feet wet with the internet. There was one PC up in the library that was connected to the internet, so I was very interested in going up there and working out how web pages worked, fiddling around with various software and stumbling upon ‘view source’. Finding out that if I changed this bit, then I could change how the website looks. Finding out that if I change this bit, that I could change the colour and finding that if I change this bit that the images don’t work. Thinking ‘what’s all that about’, fumbling my way around the markup and not really knowing what I was doing obviously back then. My course wasn’t really about that, there was a section on it, but it was just a general media course, so I was specialising in video production. From there I went on to study TV production in Bournemouth. I didn’t really have any online training there either, although I did sneak in some projects. Whilst I was studying and making films, I would be designing websites to go with those films, or making websites to go with our degree shows – that sort of thing. So although it wasn’t part of my course, I would be using the computer labs out of hours to teach myself the basics of web design.

Ryan: Okay, so at what point did you decide that the web was a career path that you wanted to go down and instead of doing that as a hobby that you wanted to do that as a career?

Paul: Well, when I left University, I went to work in a post-production facility in Soho, London at a place called Image Makers. It was a place where I did a work placement; they actually took me on as a post production runner, which was essentially collecting video tapes and making tea for the editors. But they also were quite interested in the new web scene that was happening – it was 1999 when I graduated and they wanted to get a slice of that action. Because I had a little bit of knowledge from doing this on the side at university, I set up their web department. That was really ‘in at the deep end’ doing some commercial websites, which I had never done before. It really wasn’t about being in a glamorous start up company with lots of money, but it was more about if they could undercut everybody and cash in by offering websites at a much cheaper rate. It didn’t really work out – I was consigned to a broom cupboard that I was working in and occasionally let out. It was not a particularly nice place to work, but from there I kind of accidently fell into the industry, because basically working in London as a post production runner at the time, I think the salary was something like nine grand a year. It’s only really possible if you’ve got relatives who live in London who can put you up, or if you can sleep on a friends sofa, that kind of thing – which I didn’t have. So I was trying to support myself on this salary and it was only by making the move into the web that I could afford to live in London. So from there, working half in the web, and half as a post production runner, I happened to fall into my next full time job which was working for Harrods in their web design team. Basically I was on a train with some friends of mine and we were sitting opposite this guy who was doing some work on his laptop and they got chatting to him. They were saying ‘it’s Sunday morning, why are you working’? He said he had some work to do as he ran the website for Harrods and they said ‘ah Paul’s a web designer’ and hinted maybe he could give me a job and we exchanged details on the train. A few months later I had a job at Harrods, so that was a very fortunate stroke of luck just bumping to that guy on the train. So it was there that I thought right okay, this is now what I’m doing as a career – rather than doing the TV thing, I’m now a web designer for real. I left Harrods after probably a year and a half and then I went freelance for three or four years until I joined Clear Left.

Ryan: Okay, what made you take the jump to freelance, from working for a company like Harrods?

Paul: There was a lot of internal politics at Harrods for a start. The web design team came underneath the I.T umbrella, so there was a lot of fighting internally as to whether the web site should be a marketing tool to get extra people though the front door of the shop, or whether it was supposed to be a sales tool to make direct sales instead of their catalogue. So there were people pulling our department in different directions and they had a very high turnover of people in management. It wasn’t that good a place to work even though it sounds really glamorous – and the shop really is glamorous, but I really didn’t enjoy working there a lot of the time. Also I was living in London; while I enjoyed living in London for a few years, I kind of felt that I had had enough of it. I had met Relly at the time and she had moved up to London temporarily. We were both thinking if we wanted to live in London or move somewhere else. Brighton seemed like the obvious choice, it’s like London by the sea – I can’t really remember the chain of events that brought us to live in Brighton, but we visited and it just seemed like a nice place to be, a nice place to live. There was also a burgeoning web design industry down here, so yeah we made the move. I actually moved down to Brighton before I went freelance and had a few months of commuting to Osterley which is near Twickenham. So it was in and out of London everyday as that’s where Harrods was – they had this big depot out there which was not very glamorous at all. That commute wasn’t very nice, I know some people do it every day, but I couldn’t. I know it’s only fifty minutes each way, but you’re looking at an hour and a half commute door-to-door each way. So yeah, I just moved down to Brighton and started freelancing.

Ryan: So how long did you freelance for before you joined Clear Left?

Paul: That was 2002 until 2005/2006, so three or four years.

Ryan: Do you miss freelancing – do you miss the freedom and the flexibility of being a freelancer?

Paul: Not particularly, as we get a lot of freedom at Clear Left – not as in completely flexible hours, but we’re cool as long as the work gets done and you’re there for the right amount of hours, then there’s some flexibility there. I definitely don’t miss doing loads of paperwork and sales and things like that, I much prefer being hands on in the project, as I am at Clear Left, also at Clear Left we’re getting a lot more higher profile clients than I would as a freelancer. So I’m enjoying much more the opportunities to be working on the kind of stuff that we’re working on now at Clear Left than I was working on the smaller stuff as a freelancer. So no, I don’t really miss it.

Ryan: Okay great, so what would you say your greatest achievement has been personally?

Paul: It’s great to work for a company that’s as highly regarded as Clear Left is, I do enjoy that. As I say, we’re about to start work on the re-working of the Radio 4 website. We’ve been doing some work for other big companies such as Ebay, which I wouldn’t have the opportunity to do outside of Clear Left. So it’s a real achievement to be working there, which I’m proud of and I’m really pleased to be doing – work wise that is my best achievement. I enjoy public speaking; I spoke in front of thirteen hundred people at South by South West last year and that was a real buzz – it was a real high and I really enjoyed that side of things. Other achievements that aren’t really work related are things like this silly Youtube video achievement. I’ve got this one minute Youtube video which has now got something like 14 million views – which is not work related and I didn’t even have to do anything to even achieve it, but from that point of view its quite amazing that that even happened. So little things like that.

Ryan: I didn’t hear about that, what’s the video?

Paul: Oh it’s a magic trick called ‘This and That’, which is a one minute magic trick of my hands doing a card trick, just filmed on a Lo-Fi camcorder type thing in the living room. Miraculously it was up there on Youtube in 2007 and it’s ended up getting 14 million views. It was featured on their home page, which I think had something to do with it. I can’t really explain it, but there are now hundreds of other people on Youtube doing the same trick, basically copying mine. Mine was adapted from a different card trick, but was the first one to be called ‘This and That’ – all the other ones that are called ‘This and That’ are subsequent to the one that I did. It’s quite nice to know that there are other people out there who are saying they can do the same trick and this is how I do it. Some of them are reviewing how it works, but not in a good way. They tend to teach really bad methods, so don’t get me started – if you’re going to teach how to do it, then teach the right way, else the other people who are learning how to do it will be learning from you, when in fact you are doing it wrong in your video and making it really obvious what you are doing. I’ve seen countless videos of people doing it really badly and I’ve just had to stop watching them. Have you seen the XKCD comic strip – the ‘Someone on the internet is wrong’ one? That’s like me – saying that I can’t come to bed as there are half a dozen people doing my trick wrong and I have to go and put them right.

Ryan: That’s the one that’s linked to so often now that they just say the comic number! So you’re very much into your magic then, that’s a hobby?

Paul: Yeah, I haven’t done any for a few years and I really, really should learn some new tricks to put on Youtube. Especially since now there is Google Adsense running on there and that sort of thing, but with having kids and work, I don’t ever have the time, but I really should learn some new tricks to put on Youtube. But there are only certain types of magic you can put on Youtube, they have to be tricks where there is no spectator interaction, I can’t really ask someone to pick a card, as even if I had someone else in the video to take the card, then people may assume that it had been set up. The beauty of the trick that is up there is that it tells a story and there is no interaction from the spectator, so it’s just pure sleight of hand. But it’s obviously a trick, you get some comments up there claiming that it’s not magic – I mean it’s not wizardry; I’m not casting a spell, it’s sleight of hand and a mystery, but that what magic is. I’m still interested in magic though, a whole bunch of us are going to see Derren Brown on his Enigma tour, next Tuesday evening, so that should be fun. Back when I was working in TV, I also worked on the second series of Derren Brown’s TV show, which was fun even though I was only a runner. I was only giving people directions and doing crowd control and getting people to watch his performance and that kind of thing.

Ryan: Did you get to meet him?

Paul: Yeah – which was cool, I learned a couple of tricks from him and that sort of thing.

Ryan: Cool! I’ve forgotten where we were at now with the questions; I think I asked you about your greatest achievement, are there any regrets – any career regrets? Is there anything that you’ve missed up on, or anything that you wished you’d taken or anything like that?

Paul: One of the last things that I did before I joined Clear Left was joining a company in Oxford as a Creative Director. I don’t really regret this at all but, the company that I joined were very immoral and quite deceitful to their clients, so I got out after six months as I just didn’t agree with their business ethics. It was probably an experience that I could have done without, but I don’t think that it did me any harm. I guess that if I had my time again, that I wouldn’t go and work for them again for that brief period. But apart from that, no major regrets really, except for maybe when we hand work back over to web clients, that seeing as we don’t have any retainer, as we hand things over to the web team when we’re finished, that we don’t really get that feedback from users. We don’t see projects in a live environment; we build it, we design it, then we hand it over and we never really get people bouncing ideas back and saying things like ‘it was great and I love this stuff’ or ‘I don’t like this or that’ and then having the opportunity to react on that, which is a shame.

Ryan: That’s interesting! So of all of the things at the moment that you are involved in, with your view of the industry, what are you enjoying the most?

Paul: It is work related, but at the same time it’s not work related, but I’m really enjoying the way that the web and technology is becoming a part of not only our lives as geeks, but the people who always look at us a bit oddly and say ‘why are you doing that?’ – It’s now becoming a part of their lives too. I remember when I was at university and still figuring out how the internet works. People thought I was just wasting my time, but now they’re on Facebook all of the time. I can see the Ipad becoming – and will become I’m sure, a part of my parents lives, because they’ll be able to video chat with our kids. There’s always been this big hurdle that basically the user experience and the usability have been so bad, for technology so far, that there has been no way that people such as my parents could interact with devices that use the web. This is because they use mouses and browsers – my Mum has been on courses and she still can’t figure out how to move the mouse in relation to the cursor on the screen in particular, it’s a big hurdle to get over. So I love the fact that this new stuff is becoming a part of peoples’ lives as new technology comes along. It’s really interesting to see, that we have a three and a half year old boy and whereas we grew up with things like cassette tapes – I mean it was a few years ago, I think about telling him about that. What a strange concept it would be, that to listen to music, we had to have a little tape that we had to put into a machine – that would be a really odd concept for him to think about. Actually when he grows up, it’s going to be a really odd concept for him to think about using screens that you couldn’t touch. But he’s great at using the touch screen on the Iphone – he’s really speedy at that. He’s also great at using a mouse too, considering he’s only three and a half. So at the moment I’m really enjoying seeing technology coming into peoples’ lives like that. We had this instance the other day of him saying ‘Oh, can I watch such and such’. So I pick up the TV remote and say I’d see if I could find it and he was saying ‘No no Daddy, not on there, on Cbeebies website’. So I say ah I don’t think that shows on the Cbeebies website, and he says ‘No it is’. Then he goes over to the computer and picks up the mouse and navigates through the Cbeebies website, to show me that actually it is on there and that he can find it, but I can’t.

Ryan: It will be interesting to see what he’s like in ten years time when they’ve grown up with this technology. My son is only fifteen months now and he knows to touch my Iphone to play video and that’s just weird. I’ll hold it there and he’ll touch it to watch a video of him that I’ve recorded. There’s this aspect, that to them, their whole lives are recorded from day one, where we had old photos and things like that to look back on. They’re going to have their lives documented from start to finish.

Paul: This isn’t to do with my career, but I also regret not taking many photos when I was a teenager, or in my early twenties because there weren’t digital cameras. There are some of my old friends that I don’t have photos of, who I’m still in touch with now, but today I wouldn’t not-have photos of them. I don’t know if you have heard of it, but there is this Iphone app called ‘Bloom’. Bloom is this Iphone app which essentially turns the Iphone into a surface which is just a musical instrument and if you tap it, it makes nice calming noises – look it up its really good. I’m not sure yet whether my son knows that by touching it, that he is making the noise, but it’s an interesting process to keep on letting him have a go while trying to persuade him not to put it in his mouth and to try and make some music.

Ryan: That sounds really cool! So, just to wrap up, where would you like to see yourself in the future?

Paul: Um. On a desert island somewhere.

Ryan: Everybody says that.

Paul: Ha ha, so original. I don’t know – Definitely doing some kind of creating technology content, stuff. It probably won’t be websites in ten years time, I don’t know what it will be, but I enjoy doing what I’m doing. I’m actually getting more and more interested in – well I’ve come from working as a visual designer, so working at Clear Left has exposed me a lot more to being a UX designer and not necessarily opening Photoshop and getting started. Obviously that’s not how we work, there is a lot of sketching on paper. Not illustrative, or fine art, I mean just rough sketching – will this work/won’t it work/try something else out, opening Omnigraffle and wire-framing stuff up in there, printing those out and actually seeing people using them. So I’m now becoming much more interested in design as it actually is, which is not necessarily designing to make things pretty, which was perhaps my mind set ten years ago, but design to make things easier to use for people, which again brings me back to my parents using the Ipad and the kids using the Iphone. Just making it so easy and intuitive – don’t just chuck stuff in there to make it look better, chuck stuff in to make it easier to use. So I want to head more in that direction, it’s really interesting for me.

Ryan: Ok great! Well thank you very much Paul for taking the time to talk to me.

Paul: It’s been a pleasure.

Ryan: I’m sure people will enjoy that, you’ve had an interesting career and I’ll talk to you again soon.

Paul: Cheers, thanks Ryan.

Thanks goes to Blake Williams for transcribing this interview.

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