Danny Brown has won the Design Museum’s “Designer of the year” award. From The FT’s report on the awards:
“A 27-year-old multimedia designer who first started creating images from his home computer at the age of five was yesterday named Designer of the Year.
Liverpool-born Daniel Brown received the £25,000 award at London’s Design Museum. It was presented by Jonathan Ive, head of design at Apple and winner of the inaugural prize in 2003, who said Mr Brown’s work ‘changes the way we look at and engage with digital imagery.
It is technically innovative and emotionally engaging, but also gives us an extraordinary amount of freedom in the way we experience it’.”
I could launch into a giant rant about the nature of design vs applied art, art itself, and the generally crappy job the Design Museum* does both at distinguishing between them and promoting that beyond the industry. But, after all, Danny’s stuff is at it’s best just breathtaking, and deserves this recognition.
Well done, Mr. Brown…
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* Their near-useless Flashtastrophy of a site is here. Hey, Ms. Rawsthorn! 1998 called, and they want their UI designs back!
Petafloptimism 
How strange… I went to see the Designer of the Year exhibition, spent some time wandering around, and didn’t even see Brown’s work! Maybe it’s because I rarely touch computers in museums (I get enough of staring at computers at home/work), but I didn’t realise some of those computers scattered around actually had a shortlisted designer’s work on them. Oh well.