My breakthrough moment: Ben Terrett

Long before gaining renown for his work for Gov.uk and Co-op, designer Ben Terrett won a RSA Student Design Award with an interactive CD-Rom. Here he reflects on what the piece meant to him, but also on why it might not always be good to look back

While at college I entered the RSA Student Design awards, doing the interactive brief. The project was a sort of interactive CD-Rom (but stored on ZiP discs) made in Apple Media Tools. AMT is a long forgotten piece of software that’s like a cross between PowerPoint and JavaScript. I loved it. I recently found the files, which obviously don’t work any more but I was able to salvage some screengrabs. I can’t remember the exact brief but it was something to do with government and innovation. The work involved clicking around to get the numbers to spin and form words. The numbers represented government and the spinning represented innovation. Obviously.