Meet Oliver Ware - Mud’s new Digital Design Director

It's an exciting time for Mud. A couple of months ago, we welcomed our new Digital Design Director, Oliver Ware to the team. Ollie brings over two decades worth of multi-disciplinary design experience to the agency, and his a background in art direction, UX design, digital design and motion design and animation has seen him work for an impressive roster of clients; Rolls-Royce, BMW, MINI, PRS, Samsung, Sky, Warner Bros, Universal Studios, Island Records, AXA, ESPN, Dolby to name but a few.

Even though he’s already got well and truly stuck into all the client projects we've got going on right now, we stole some time with Ollie to find out more about him and what’s kept him so dedicated to the design profession over the years...

How did you get here? What have been the defining moments of your career to date?

Not exact maths, but I’ve been on the agency side for around 65% of my career, and the other half client side. An early highlight was 2 or 3 years into my career for a company (which is long gone now) called Hyperlaunch. They worked on interactive games using Flash and had lots of music and film clients; and one of the clients was the Star Wars Franchise. So as a young designer, I got to work on a project called Clones vs Droids. I used to love gaming as a kid and this multiplayer Flash game turned out to be a massive hit! Three million people used it. So that was a boyhood dream!

After that, I spent a long time working for Bristol-based digital agencies. My longest stint was with the good people at truedigital, where I honed my skills in design for digital products over eight years.

But really, the most defining has got to be my work for the FA, for England Football Learning. It was the first time I’d worked for a not-for-profit, and doing work that was helping society felt good; it feels nurturing as a designer to know you're doing something that is having a positive impact. And through my work, through volunteering with my son's football team, I was able to see the impact of grassroots coaching end-to-end.

What attracted you to Mud? What excites you most about this role?

Being in-house, I was craving some fresh challenges and variety. Mud has a solid not-for-profit client list, and as an agency felt principled and purposeful, which mirrors my own approach. Working with organisations and businesses that do have a sense of purpose behind them, whether that’s environmental or societal change, is inherently more fulfilling.

Plus there’s a talented team here; strong in conceptual design, in UX, in attention-to-detail. Talent, and experience — in the QA I’ve done on the developers work so far everything is spot on!

What am I bringing? I find applied design incredibly satisfying, so the thinking and attention-to-detail to create genuinely useful, digital products for clients. But more generally, I’m bringing creativity as a means of communicating; brand design to create connections between people and brand, UI/UX design to build effective products and motion design skills to ignite more imagination.

Through the initial project work, I’m implementing more design system thinking to improve brand consistency and resilience. So laying the foundations in Figma early on in our projects, to improve efficiency and support integration with AI. That means making sure Figma files are set up correctly; semantic variables, primitive colour tokens, typography scales, all that stuff. Spending time to get that right at the start pays off.

How would you describe your approach to design?

I’ve got some core principles which I’ve developed over the years, and they underpin all of the work I do as designer:

Flexibility. Every brief, user, context is different — so always keeping my approach open. Challenging the brief, but respecting the goal; making sure I’ve taken the time to fully grasp the strategy, the audience and the client to then challenge existing ideas to see where we can take them further, but always with respect to the objectives. Some ideas may not be the right execution, but at least it shows the client that I’m testing how they can evolve beyond a standard design response. And going above and beyond! That’s what gets you repeat business.

I touched on this earlier, but design to make a difference; that feeling of doing good for society is a big principle for me. And finally, the devil really is in the details. The detail isn’t just for me, the designer; scoping out components properly and collaborating with the developers ensures we've designed all the edge cases and planned how they’re going to be implemented in the backend. This work all supports quality delivery of design concepts within time constraints. Am I a bit of a perfectionist? Probably, I think you’ve got to be in design.

What does an exciting project look like to you?

In the past I’ve worked in a fully agile team, which at the time felt like the first taste of true collaboration. Where it's not just the designers coming up with the ideas, but the ideas are coming from anywhere and anyone in the business. That kind of cross-pollination of thoughts that comes from focusing a range of technical mindsets on the same goal, and seeing what they can come up with, makes for exciting work.

And again, purposeful work, seeing the impact the work has in reality is rewarding. Mud has an excellent track record in building meaningful digital products that serve and support people, rather than designing solely for commercial purposes. So I’m looking forward to collaborating with the team to work on these projects end-to-end, defining the brand strategy, designing the brand execution and delivering that in an engaging way; making it come alive in a way that feels enriching yet dynamic. 

It probably reflects my own anxieties as a parent, but I’d love to work on a project that helps young people navigate social media. There’s a big societal shift happening: with more data on the impacts of screen-time as well as the proposed bans on social media and smartphone usage for kids. I’d like to work in this space to help parents and their kids to be informed, and make the online world safer for children in the future.

Where do you find creative fuel?

All the ideas come when you're on the move. I love cycling, and when I’m on the bike I do a lot of thinking. Then I usually have to stop on the side of the road, and send an email to myself so I don’t forget!

But you can get inspiration from anywhere, from architecture to art, galleries or even films — much more than scrolling through Pinterest or dribbble. Going back to my point about agile working, there’s creative fuel in collaboration. It’s cool what happens when you get everyone involved, and fresh perspectives offer new ways of solving problems.

There are big shifts in our industry underfoot, but what matters when it comes to design briefs?

AI is regurgitating what already exists out there in the world. Even though yes, the quality of the prompt can improve the quality of the output, there’s just still no original value in that. So when it comes to design briefs, there’s no question; the ideas should always be human. You want that originality, that spark to be the catalyst of the design and its conceptual and digital development. How we analyse the brief, and how we talk to our clients; it’s all human conversation. We're not feeding it a brief and telling it to come up with 5 ideas — I think that's a dangerous place to be.

But once the foundations are there, I’m using it to reduce the repetitive and more laborious tasks. By setting Claude up with skills using our design system that we’ve created, it can use existing components to create artefacts. Also, I’ve been experimenting with coding to put together first iterations of say, an interactive carousel. Our team will develop it in practice, but it provides both clients and the internal team with a richer reference to work with. It’s a sounding board, a test bed, and a tool for iterating and scaling our ideas.

And it's still early days, I'm by no means an expert, but I’m embracing it, because I can see the power of AI in scaling a design system. It is worth the effort, because if, for example, there’s a new sub-brand; the colours, the typography can be updated easily — because it's all in one central system. The foundations and core principles are there and you can expand it. The design system is the bridge between design and code, and design and AI,. Together they can provide this easy, cost-effective scalability. And for websites to have that longevity, they need to be able to scale.