If you’ve managed to tear your eyes away from the stunning images, then read on to get introduced to the creator of www.shinybinary.com

UK-based Nik Ainley is relatively fresh to the digital arts game, currently enjoying his third successful year as a web designer and freelance digital artist. He made the transition from being a potential nutty Physics professor to hip digital artist quite by coincidence.

“It was a bit of an accident really,” Ainley explains. “I picked up a copy of Photoshop and fell in love with it immediately. I spent a lot of time just messing about and improving my skills, but when I left university I realised I wanted to continue with graphics creation. Luckily my level of Photoshop was now good enough to use in a career, so I got a job as a web designer.”

Despite a brief detour in the career path, it was pretty obvious from an early age that Ainley was going to end up being attached to a computer one way or another – whether it was science-based or through the arts. “I’m not that sure I ever really had a definite idea of what I wanted to do as a kid, but I think I knew it would be something technical. I’ve always been one to play around with computers and gadgets and had a big interest in science, so I thought I’d end up involved in that somehow.”

Lucky for us, Photoshop ruled and the design process started rolling for Ainley. In 2004, he set up Shinybinary (www.shinybinary.com), namely as a source to generate website work. Since then, it’s gone through two makeovers and a record number of visitors, with statistics shocking its creator. Shinybinary clocked up over a quarter of a million visitors in its first version and decided to go ahead with version two in August 2006 to keep things moving and progressing – and progress they did, with more than 300,000 visitors in the first eight months of the second incarnation. “Near the end of last year, I received my millionth visitor, which is great as I never expected to get anywhere near that when I started the site,” says Ainley. “My website is pretty much my entire way of self-promotion. Thankfully, now it’s established I get a decent number of visitors, and enough of them are interested in commissioning me that I don’t really have to go looking for work.”

At just 25, Ainley has already enjoyed the success of being named by an industry magazine as one of the top ten up-and-coming creative talents for 2006, he’s exhibited at the prestigious OFFF exhibition in Barcelona and has seen his designs displayed in magazines, books and clothing ranges.

But getting to this point has cost Ainley some hard graft, teaching himself Photoshop alongside studying for a Physics degree at Imperial College, London. “When I first started, I just played around with every function to see what they did, and slowly worked each one out,” Ainley says. “I think most people learn the same way – first you just mess about and see what comes out. Then, when you’ve learned some of the tools, you can actually plan a picture from the start and hopefully end up with what you intended (although it never quite works out that way).”

With no formal training, Ainley relied on himself to get things right; if things didn’t work first time round, then he’d try again until it did. “Since I didn’t know anyone else who used Photoshop at the time, I just had to work things out myself, which was quite frustrating.” Having experienced the frustrations and struggles for himself, Ainley now shows a lot of compassion for fellow Photoshoppers and like the saint of the Photoshop world, often lends a helping hand. “I try and answer anyone who emails Photoshop questions to me now, as I know how useful it would have been when I was learning.”

Ainley’s big break as an artist came when he was invited to join depthCORE.com. “It doesn’t sound much,” says Ainley, “but being asked to join the digital art group depthCORE was quite a break. It was the first real recognition from an established group of artists that my pictures were more than just amateur doodles.” From there things really started hotting up for Ainley, with recognition from design-based magazines coming from left, right and centre.

These days, Ainley juggles web design commissions with a variety of artistic projects. His work is an eclectic mix of subjects and styles, but one thing that links them is his fearless use of colour. It plays such a key role in Ainley’s work, you’d be forgiven for assuming Ainley sticks to rigid rules in its appliance. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. “Whatever looks good, looks good. You can go into the emotions or semiotics of colours when producing pictures with very specific meanings, otherwise I just like to mix it up. Photoshop’s adjustment tools are a godsend for this. I can’t remember the last picture I did that didn’t have about ten adjustment layers stacked at the top.”

Although Ainley takes a pretty laid-back approach to colours, that’s not to say he doesn’t apply any rules to his work. Many of his pieces either heavily feature type, or revolve around type completely. It seems, in Ainley’s mind, this is one thing you can’t afford to get wrong. “Most of my typographical work is based around very short words or phrases where a lot of the normal rules of typography aren’t so important. However, if you’re dealing with large chunks of text then it’s all about legibility, alignment, kerning and all that. With single words, you can heavily adapt fonts and can style each letter in as much detail as you like. If people want to experiment with this sort of work, then I recommend really trying to get a feeling for the word/phrase and pick a font that echoes that.”

Despite veering off-path from his Physics-related aspirations, Ainley is forever thankful for his chosen career that comes naturally to him. “Even if I had another job I’d still be doing it as a hobby, so to be paid for it makes me feel I’m very lucky,” he remarks. And as for keeping motivated in a self-employed environment? “Having bills to pay does a pretty good job at keeping me going,” he says.

It seems in a world of discontent, Ainley is one of the lucky few who really loves what they do. That’s not to say there haven’t been the lows, as Ainley is the first to admit. “There were some periods when I was working as a web designer and I was incredibly bored, which was pretty hard to deal with. HTML and CSS coding can be quite fun, but web design is all about usability and so creativity always has to take second place. I didn’t like this and am glad I could focus more on the artwork.”

Luckily with the lows come the highs, and Ainley has enjoyed a hugely successful year making himself known in the industry. He says, “The full interview I did with a design magazine has to be one of the highs so far; it was the first I had done and was a huge honour. For the first time then, I felt like I was on a level with the big guns.”

Now enjoying the ‘big gun’ status himself, the future is looking bright for this talented young artist. Determined to keep evolving artistically, you can’t help thinking that this guy is going to be reaping the successes of his hard work for a very long time. “My ambition is to just keep learning software and techniques so that I can produce more of my ideas,” he says. “At the moment I’m still limited by my technical abilities, and a lot of ideas I have to leave as I have no idea how to turn them into reality. I hope that becomes less common in the future.”

If Ainley feels limited by his ability at this stage, just imagine what he’ll be capable of in the future. It’s an exciting time as he continues in his voyage of discovery and we can’t wait to see where he ends up.