Ash Thorp is another alumnus of Atlanta’s ReMIX conference for code and design who has made it big (or, to be accurate, big-ger). Like Chris Twigg and 3Gear, who were profiled in the last post, we were fortunate to have Ash Thorp present at ReMIX a few years ago when it was still possible to get him.
Ash was recently named to the Verge 50, squeezed somewhere between Tim Cook and Matthew McConaughey. The Verge website’s Fifty of 2014 is their list of the “most important people at the intersection of technology, art, science and culture.”
Ash Thorp is a visual designer for movies, designing both the intros for movies as well as the overall look and feel of a film. His specialty is sci fi and superhero movies and you’ve seen his work everywhere from Prometheus to Ender’s Game and beyond. He first came to our attention because of his website where he lifted the curtain a bit and showed how film design is actually done. From this, we could start piecing together the similarities between what he did and the more standard graphic design typically done for digital and print.
Ash Thorp is also the host of the Collective Podcast, which are a series of open-ended and meandering conversations about design, life and the universe. It is an earnest attempt by creative professionals to connect the world with their work and to use their work as designers as a prism for understanding the world. There is nothing quite like it in my field, the software development world, and we are all the poorer for it.
He’s also done lots of other cool projects, like his homage to Ghost in the Shell, that are all about being creative and sharing inspiration without an underlying profit motive. He is constantly trying to share and change and mold and give which is as much a testament to his boundless energy as it is to his essentially giving spirit.
Here is the brilliant presentation Ash gave at the ReMIX Conference a few years ago, revealing his approach to … well … work, life and the universe.
The Future of Interface Technology – Ash Thorp from ReMIX South on Vimeo.