Charlie Clark

I’m a Brooklyn based creative developer, currently working at B-Reel.

Previously I worked at Domani Studios and Stinkdigital. In my spare time I like to work on personal projects; I designed, built and now curate We Are Visual Animals, a sort of anti-blog featuring emerging visual creatives. My latest project is thecolorsofmotion.com , an interactive data visualization that allows you to explore the use of color in movies.

Questions for Charlie Clark:

• What did you do before becoming a designer?

  I studied Graphic Design at Parsons in New York. While I was there, I got more and more interested in the interactive stuff, mainly playing around with Flash. When I graduated I was looking for design or development internships. I was lucky enough to get an offer as a developer intern at Stinkdigital, where I essentially hit the ground running working professionally as a web developer.

• Where do you turn for inspiration?

  I try to absorb as much culture as I can: I try to watch at least two movies a week, listen to new music whenever possible, follow the news, check out new restaurants. The thing is, you never know where inspiration is going to come from.

• Which are your favorite studios, designers or agencies?

  Resn is one of my all time favorites, I love how crazy their stuff is. WatsonDG has been killing it recently. There are a bunch of amazing French studios and agencies doing great stuff but I think my favorite right now is Merci-Michel. I’m also a huge fan of Active Theory’s work. From a dev standpoint their stuff is so slick and snappy and inspiring.

• Is your city a good place for designers?

  New York is a great city for just about everything (aside from relaxing). There’s a ton of incredible agencies doing mind-blowing work, but that’s only the beginning of what makes this city great: there are so many events, meet-ups, exhibitions, activities, concerts, going on at any given time that there’s really no excuse to not be inspired. To be honest, there’s so much going on that at times it can be overwhelming! Sometimes you need to get out of the city for a while to clear your head. But you always end up missing the energy, and when you get back there’s always a million new things to experience.

• Which technologies are you excited about?

  I’m majorly excited about the potential of WebGL. Bringing 3D to the browser has started a veritable revolution in terms of the depth of content and complexity of experiences that can be created. Other things I’m excited about: wearable tech, virtual reality, 3d printing and scanning, the internet of things… These are exciting times!

• Do you listen to music while you work? Describe your playlist.

  I’d say I listen to music around 50% of the time. If a new album came out that I want to listen to, or a colleague is playing horrible music on Sonos i’ll put my headphones on and listen to some jams. A sample from my playlist: Future Islands, Run The Jewels, Caribou, The Antlers…

• Have you always had a keen interest in technology since childhood? What sparked your interest?

  I was always fascinated with building things and I always was interested in technology, but it wasn’t until college that my interest was truly sparked. I was studying graphic design at the time, and I was in the computer lab working in Photoshop or something, and this guy next to me was doing some really beautiful rollover effects for buttons in Flash. Interactively, it’s about as simple as it gets, but it was enough to trigger my fascination and make me want to learn how to build interactive things.

• As a developer, where do you get your inspiration from?

  I browse Awwwards daily. We’ve also got a chat room at work where we share inspiring stuff. My main source of dev inspiration has to be Twitter though. If you follow the right people it’s the absolute best way to discover cool new projects, experiments, tools and libraries.

• What essential items are in your developer toolbox?

  Sublime Text 3 is my go to editor. I love how simple it is and how easy it is to extend and customize. I use Transmit a lot for FTP stuff. Code wise I usually start off projects with a couple essential libraries: require, underscore, tweenlite. Depending on the project I may use Backbone for more structure. I also love tools such as bower and grunt to speed up my workflow. I’ve been playing around with setting up virtual machines and creating more streamlined deployment processes but I’m still a ways away from mastering that.

• What programming languages do you use? Which did you learn first?

  On a day to day basis, I’ll probably be writing PHP, CSS and HTML, but Javascript is my bread and butter.

• Where do you see the industry in 5 years?

  Wow that’s a tough one. The landscape is changing so fast that’s it’s hard to really picture that far ahead. I see services like Squarespace making it tougher for agencies to get away with charging loads of money to build relatively simple sites. I also see aspects of game development creeping more and more into the web, either through interactive video experiences or immersive interactive 3D environments. The new hardware emerging will certainly have an impact. Basically I’m excited, because we’re gonna be making increasingly cool work :)

• Are you working on any personal projects?

  I regularly publish interviews on the art blog that I designed and built We Are Visual Animals. I’m also continuing to develop my project the thecolorsofmotion.com , most recently selling prints using the color data I’ve generated. I have a couple other personal project in the works, but nothing I can talk about just yet :)