Richard Shackleton

I’m a designer and artist. It took me years to consciously give that calling the focus it deserved.

Originally trained as a software engineer, I have always been drawn to model-making, special effects, art and film. Early on, I joined a UK visual effects pioneer and wrote software used by Hollywood studios, including Walt Disney and Industrial Light & Magic. Being alongside artists making the impossible feel believable shaped everything that followed.

That proximity drew me from engineering into designing creative tools, then into an unexpectedly long turn combining design with strategy, helping founders, CEOs and creative businesses grow and navigate key moments. It was rewarding work, but the creative thread kept pulling.

So, I co-founded a small design studio and mostly work in secret on future products for global technology companies.

My focus has shifted toward physical model-making, animation and storytelling, thoughtfully combined with new technologies. Whether designing, making, coding or finding another way, I’m drawn to the puzzle of taking an abstract idea, finding the right story, and carefully making it real.

More comfortable making things than talking about them, I use this small portfolio to get better at that, open the door, and make space for what comes next.

Richard

LinkedIn Oh Hi Tomorrow

2026 | Feature Animation Props

Scale model film prop tests.

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2026 | Feature Animation Puppets

Puppet tests for a stop-motion animated feature film, bringing ideas from Designing Creative Tools to life through a fictional story.

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2026 | Animation Shorts

A series of scale paper models created to accompany Designing Creative Tools, exploring 50 tools that have shaped how we make things. Each became the subject of a short stop-motion film, revealing something of its story, design and character, and was exhibited in a cinema alongside the book launch. Tiny details, imperfect edges and the pleasure of building by hand gave the project an appreciated tactile and playful quality.

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2026 | Designing Creative Tools Book

Co-authored and published by BIS, Designing Creative Tools explores the history, design and cultural impact of 50 tools, from ochre and charcoal to cameras, sewing machines, synthesisers, software and AI. Written with Guillaume Couche and Sanya Rai, it brings together research, interviews, design insight and a long-standing fascination with how the tools we create shape what we make, and the culture that follows.

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2025 | Acrylic on Canvas Painting

A work-in-progress homage to Larry Elmore’s The Red Dragon, created for the 1983 Dungeons & Dragons “red box” set. The painting will continue beyond the canvas and onto the frame, with the dragon reaching out from its world into ours.

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2025 | reMarkable Futures

Confidential work with reMarkable’s incubation lab and design team, imagining possible futures for products designed to create space for thinking and creativity. The work moved between product design, storytelling, filmmaking and visual effects, turning abstract possibilities into tangible glimpses of what might one day exist.

2024 | InSight Camera

A speculative camera designed for a future where smart glasses and headsets may change how we see and capture the world. Augmented reality places the viewfinder, framing and settings directly in front of the photographer, freeing the camera from the constraints of a fixed screen and encouraging more physical, expressive composition.

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2024 | Interface Design Book

Co-authored and published by BIS, Interface Design explores how we design the interfaces between people and increasingly intelligent objects, devices and systems. Written with Guillaume Couche and Samuel Iliffe, it brings together practical ideas, design principles, product stories and thoughts on where technology and machine intelligence might take us.

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2024 | Oh Hi Tomorrow Design Studio

The point where years of engineering, creative tools, product design and strategy finally came together in one place. Oh Hi Tomorrow is a deliberately small studio and innovation lab, moving between workshop and boardroom to explore ideas, make things and help organisations decide what should exist next. Alongside client work, it creates its own products, books, films and experiments.

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2018 | Disguise Visual Experiences

Product and market strategy alongside the CEO and executive team as Disguise grew from creating electrifying visuals for stadium concerts and live events into virtual production, film, broadcast and immersive experiences. The challenge was to connect hardware, software and creative possibility into a compelling story that helped the business grow while opening new ways to create visual experiences.

2017 | Unreal Engine Platform

Product strategy alongside Epic Games’ VP of Unreal Engine and VP of Product Marketing, exploring the evolution of Unreal beyond games and into filmmaking and animation. Real-time graphics brought together ideas from games, cinematography, visual effects and VR, opening new ways for studios and smaller creative teams to imagine and make stories.

2008 | Nuke Visual Effects Software

Product management and later strategy direction, helping shape both Foundry’s products and its growth into a leading creative software company. Alongside the CEO and executive team, the work spanned product strategy, investment and acquisitions. Foundry’s tools became central to the visual craft of studios including Industrial Light & Magic, Wētā FX, Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios and Sony Pictures Imageworks.

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2007 | Precision Hardware Interface

Product design for Digital Vision’s Precision control surface, an expert physical interface for professional film colour correction and grading. Developed with a leading Stockholm industrial design studio, it combined trackballs, knobs and dedicated controls with configurable touchscreens, translating complex software into a tactile interface shaped around how colourists work.

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2002 | Nucoda Creative Technology

Engineering direction and later product design for high-end colour grading and finishing systems used by facilities including Pixar, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and Technicolor. The work sat at the highest level of image-making precision, building complex tools while making them intuitive for people creating cinematic images.

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2000 | Socratto Visual Effects Software

Engineering management for Sony’s ambitious high-end film compositing system, developed across teams in Japan, London and the US. Sophisticated tracking, keying, paint and colour tools came together with dedicated rendering hardware and video I/O, requiring close collaboration across cultures, disciplines and time zones to turn a complex technical vision into something artists could use live with clients.

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1996 | Parallax Visual Effects Software

Engineering at the leading edge of visual-effects software on Silicon Graphics workstations. Matador and Media Illusion brought painting, rotoscoping, tracking, compositing and animation into powerful tools used by studios including Industrial Light & Magic, Digital Domain, Disney Feature Animation and Sony Pictures. It was a fascinating place to be close to both the artistry and machinery behind filmmaking, as many of these techniques became foundations of modern digital visual effects.

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1995 | Virtual Reality Lab

Early exploration of VR and interactive 3D environments at Bell Northern Research, using Superscape VRT on high-end PCs alongside advanced real-time visualisation on Silicon Graphics workstations. The focus sat between technology and experience, exploring not just what the hardware could do, but what might actually be interesting and useful to make with it.

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1994 | The Nature of History

An early experiment in interactive art and machine vision, created for the Natural History Museum in London. Camera tracking and video projection allowed visitors’ movements to control the imagery around them, turning the audience into part of the work. A fascinating meeting of art, science and technology, and an early exploration of computers creating responsive physical experiences.

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1991 | Ink Pen Illustrations

Rotring ink pen on paper, a homage to the wonderful illustrations found in the 1980s Fighting Fantasy interactive gamebook series by Ian Livingstone and other authors, hand-rendered with greater detail than the originals.

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