Daniel Brown

One of the pioneering generation of self-taught web designers, DANIEL BROWN is noted for the humour and playfulness of his interactive animations often inspired by nature.
Like many web designers Daniel Brown discovered the medium - and drew his early inspiration - from the video games he had played since childhood. He then sought to refine the frenzied, sometimes brutal aesthetics of those games by creating interactive images for the web which would have the same sensory effect on the user as listening to a beautiful piece of music.

Born in Liverpool in 1977, Brown grew up among computers, both by playing video games and watching his father at work as a pioneer of computer graphics. After his father left Liverpool, a family friend the late Roy Stringer, who worked in the Learning Methods Unit at the city's John Moores University, allowed Brown to use the computers there.
The Learning Methods Unit was then developing early interactive learning tools on CD-Rom and the internet. After Brown left school, Stringer gave him a job at Amaze, the design company spun out of the Unit. Brown also developed a personal site, www.noodlebox.com. When it was launched in 1997, noodlebox introduced a fluid, playfulness to web design, in contrast to the pragmatic, often sterile visual style which then dominated the medium.

Now based in London where he works for the SHOWstudio web site, Daniel Brown has harnessed subsequent advances in technology to imbue new work - such as Bits and Pieces - with light, texture and the illusion of three-dimensionality. Often inspired by nature, his projects have a spontaneity and freshness even when he revisits old themes like Flowers and Butterflies. His goal in his interactive work is to elicit an instinctive response from the user by making them forget the technology.

Daniel Brown has replaced noodlebox with Play/Create, a site on which he posts his experimental work and that of other designers. After participating in the Design Museum's Web Wizards exhibition in 2002, he featured in the Great Brits, the survey of new British design organised by the Design Museum and British Council in Paul Smith's Milan headquarters during the April 2003 Milan Furniture Fair. Daniel Brown won the Design Museum's Designer of the Year prize in 2004.

There is a good piece on Daniel Brown on the Design Museum site here