Ben Gillbanks

This might not sound like an important thing - but watching the trailer for Toy Story (not the movie, the trailer), was a turning point in my life. I had always enjoyed doing creative things but it was then I decided I wanted to work in 3d art and animation for a living. Things turned out a little different but it was this event that set me on the path to studying digital arts at university.

In 1998 I went to university to study Digital Art with multimedia computing. I graduated in 2001 with a first class honors degree.

The course was very broad covering everything from Photoshop and web design through sound editing, video game development, computer programming, and special effects.

Each year we were able to tailor the course a little more towards what we wanted to do as a career. In my final year I was focused on 3d art and video games - since that’s where my passions lay.

My end of course project was an interactive 3d walkthrough of the British Museum showing some of the exhibits, and it was displayed at the British Museum.

Whilst at university I was asked if I wanted to apply for a job at a digital agency working on the worlds first ‘e-mall’. The concept was to make an interactive shopping center with exhibits that would encourage people to spend more money, and to return frequently.

Whilst on this project I did 3d art for 2 main projects. One was a dancing robot app - that let people put their faces on a robot and then boogey to the music. The other was a fish based virtual pet that let you feed your electronic fish each time you visited the shopping center.

Rocket Boards was my first experience of making a complete shareware video game. It wasn’t my first game, but it was the first time I had tried to make money from games.

Rocket Boards is a 3d racing game - inspired by games like Mario Kart. I think I bit off more than I could chew. I had never made anything as complex as this before and it took a lot longer to make than I imagined. But I did finish it in the end and I sold it to a publisher - so people could actually buy it in the shops! The publisher paid me £4000, and I earned a few hundred extra selling it through my website.

The biggest thing I got from it, however, was the job at Miniclip. It was never said outright but I am confident that if I didn’t have Rocket Boards in my portfolio I wouldn’t have gotten the Miniclip job, and so I wouldn’t be where I am today.

I joined Miniclip in 2004 as a multimedia artist; to help them to make games look nice. At the time Miniclip was tiny, I was employee number 3, so we all chipped in and did a bit of everything. So I did everything from creating animations, game icons, and promotional content, through to web design, and even customer support.

Eventually they learnt that I was interested in web design so I spent more and more of my time doing that, until I eventually became the Director of Web Development; managing a team of over 20 web designers and PHP programmers.

In 2013 (ish) I decided I didn’t enjoy being a manager so I took a step backwards and moved into a senior development role - looking at the future of the Miniclip website, and testing new designs and innovations that could help to move it forward. My last big project at Miniclip was a redesign project which is still (largely) in use today.

Pro Theme Design is a premium WordPress themes shop. In 2007 I joined forces with Darren Hoyt to create one of the first premium WordPress magazine themes. In early 2008 we released Mimbo Pro to the world.

Mimbo Pro included a number of innovations - one of which was the use of featured images that automatically resized using a php script called TimThumb. That script had a whole story of it’s own but it lead to the addition of featured images in WordPress.

In April 2012 I had the first of our themes published on wordpress.com. I now have more than 20 themes available on wordpress.com making Pro Theme Design the most prolific theme author on the site.

MasterWP is a weekly email for WordPress Masters. It was a collaboration between myself and Alex Denning and ran for 5 years before being aquired in February 2022.

When I worked at Miniclip we had a social animation community called Sketch Star. This included a Flash app, and a gallery of animations, with competitions, awards, user accounts, and all sorts. It was a fantastic app with a passionate community but it was expensive to run and didn’t earn enough to justify the expense. Shortly after we shut it down I asked if I could release my own version written in JavaScript.

It took me about 5 years of noodling and procrastinating to actually finish something and release it, and that something was Brush Ninja. The app was a lot simpler than Sketch Star and there was no social aspect, but this has allowed me to build the entire project on my own.

I love creating things, and generative art is a great way for me to combine the joy of pixel art and the surprise (and automation) created by computers. Generative art is the act of using code to create pictures. I’ve written a bit about my process creating generative art with PHP on my personal site.