KOTA welcome Senior Digital Designer James Huse!

Welcome to the team James!

After a series of client wins, we are delighted to announce James Huse as our Senior Digital Designer. James’s portfolio, experience and personality led us to secure his services last week.

James has a plethora of agency experience having worked at M&C Saatchi, Something inc, Zoopla and most recently Huge.

Our first full-time remote hire, James will be working from his studio in Bristol and visiting London where possible.

We caught up with James and asked him a few questions…

 

What attracted you to KOTA?

A shared passion for awesome digital design and branding, my two favourite things to do! I’ve had lots of full-time gigs over the years, so combined with spending the past 18 months as a freelancer I’ve figured out what makes a good fit for me. KOTA seems to be a lovely bunch of like-minded creatives with a passion to push new ideas and test new ways of working which really excites me.

 

Why did you become a designer?

I liked building stuff and sketching growing up. I never shook off that itch to create. Combined with an addiction to tech and learning new software, being a designer was really the only thing that made sense to me.

 

Tell us about the projects you’re most proud of and why.

My favourite projects are the ones where you get to work with a team of creatives firing on all cylinders, throwing ideas around and generally enjoying themselves. Collaborating with people when they’re genuinely passionate about their work makes all the difference. That passion is normally written all over the end result and users/consumers respond well to that, so everyone wins. One example was a website I worked on years ago for world baking day, where we shared a load of recipes via a site filled with illustrations and mini-games. We had a team of creatives coming up with games, illustrators working on animations, devs stitching it together and the design team working across all of the above. Consumers loved the visuals and wanted to bake the recipes. So the brand wins, we got to make some cool shit and consumers got to eat cake.

 

Where do you find inspiration?

There’s never one source of inspiration I prefer. It’s easy to rely too heavily on award websites and dribble, but it all gets a bit samey after a while, everyone copies each other and it goes around in circles. I enjoy casting a wide net and looking for visual inspiration offline. I sometimes don’t look for inspiration at all to avoid emulating others, just to see what comes out of my head and test things out. I dread to think of the hours I’ve lost to Pinterest looking for a perfect reference when I could have just made something myself!