MARK LIGHT | www.marklight.co.uk
Senior Art Director. 10 years experience. MA Electronic Arts, BA Fine Art

Email:info@marklight.co.uk   Phone: 07812 042 460    Adr: 113a Gander Green Lane, SM1 2EU

What I’m striving for: Methods for shared creativity that strengthen, rather than dilute; Real-world metaphors that actually work in the digital world; Opportunities hidden in the quirks of a medium; Sculpting different technologies into a consistent, unique whole; Putting the hard work in, so the user doesn’t have to; Getting to the heart of what needs to be said; Not just giving the client what they want, but what they actually need.

Skills: Ideation; Sketching; Illustration; Linear animation and direction; Creating and maintaining a visual language to a polished level; Intuitive user-centric design; Functional, technically achievable layout; Definition, presentation and explanation; Optimising processes and strategies.

Proficient in: Adobe Creative Suite, AS2
Comfortable with: XML, CSS, HTML, Javascript, Microsoft Expression Studio (Silverlight)

Oct 06-Present
MRM Worldwide London | Digital, data and direct marketing
Clients: Intel, Microsoft, Nestle, Sky, Unilever, Mastercard, NMA

Senior Art Director / Interaction Zone Lead
Discipline lead for a team of 5 designers in the ‘Interaction Zone’, responsible for brand quality and consistency, productivity, motivation, development and strategic direction of interaction design within the creative department.

Duties: Working closely with Account Managers and Project Managers, I’m their first point of contact for interactive issues, for example: assigning appropriately skilled resources to a project, or firefighting the challenges of delivering to different platforms.

Research: I therefore need to stay abreast of UI technologies, communicating their limits and possibilities internally and to clients. Lately we’ve been training up on Microsoft’s Expression Suite, getting to grips with the ‘Silverlight’ plugin and testing out new workflow methods.

New business: I advise on what is creatively appropriate and technically achievable, creating documents and assets for pitch work and signing off scopes.

Delivery: When planning moves into building, I liaise between the creative directors, my team and tech to ensure production keeps to schedule. A recent example was overseeing an extremely tight Sky HD banner ad campaign with some strategic example files and a lot of client negotiation.

Communication: As a company we’ve been helping clients such as Intel understand the wider opportunities for digital marketing, beyond pushing banners into more ‘earned’ experiences. Involved from conception to execution, I was head of interaction on the team who just finished a six month sim game project; in the last phase, co-ordinating assets and prototyping functionality for developers, as well as concepting for the promotional campaigns, gearing up for the launch.

Shared Success: On a typical project I’m part of a larger creative team, but occasionally, as on a Unilever Magnum minisite, it was just me and two developers. A lot of what I do is at the handover point, adjusting designs for production, so I’ve been lobbying to get developers into the workflow early on and co-hosting a series of talks to improve the quality of work and communication between our departments.

Presentation: This fed into techniques we used while creating templates for the Nestle Professional online platform. As design lead I needed to not only develop the identity and UI, but also present its formation to an audience of international stakeholders to ensure their continual buy-in. Every design decision had to therefore have a watertight rationale, stem directly from the functionality and support the newly created brand.

Range: As my department has been involved in projects as diverse as intranet frontends to short films, I’ve been fortunate to experience the full spectrum. It’s not all wireframes and documentation…sometimes it’s robots and secret agents.

Senior Interaction Designer
Flash presentations, banners, minisites and CD-ROMS.
UI design for different platforms: Sharepoint, websites, intranets, emails.
Asset creation: icons, illustrations, storyboards , photo-retouching.
Project documentation; cost and time estimates.

Interaction Designer
Designing and building interactive learning objects and intranet front ends:
Flash animation and webpage layouts.

Mar 03-Sept 03
Lego – Character design and flash animation.
Itraffic /Agency.com - banner ad production for Freeserve and BA online campaigns.
ActionDog Productions – rebrand; website. Teaching Flash to teens for music videos.
GetLucky TV - UI design for Interactive TV gameshows and producer controls.

Visionworks Internet - Flash Designer
Firemelon - Web designer
The Incentive Group – Artworker

Courses Advanced AS2, Blend and Silverlight 1