Benjamin Relton

About

I began as a graphic designer in 2013. Since childhood, I’d been mesmerised by deck graphics and skateboarding. I grew up in the dormant old port town of Hartlepool, UK. Hartlepool and skateboarding were worlds apart, but visually felt cut from the same cloth. Rough, raw, surrounded by characters who “kept it pushing”. Judging by the connections I built through skateboarding in my adolescence, I wasn’t the only one who felt this way. Being known as a creative got me recommended to a UK skateboarding company, producing video, stickers, merchandise and a new logo. That opportunity led me to study design academically. I laugh now, because I naively thought I’d design deck graphics and posters for a living. Not quite, unfortunately! I realised I had to put in the work, doing meaningful things I didn’t always enjoy, to earn those exciting projects. Strangely, that was when the work started to interest me most. The “boring” stuff. I developed a taste for solving problems. My so-called creative brain was hiding an analytical way of thinking I’d never found a way to apply at school. Through design work in activism, local governance, and the public and private sectors, it clicked: it’s all meaningful. It all has impact. The more industries I worked in, the more things I failed at, the more wins I celebrated, the more I felt I grew years at a time. These days, my role has grown beyond designing. I lead a design team at the longest-standing digital agency in Teesside, Calm, shaping UX strategy and leading product design for our own software and our clients. Oh, and I’m still searching for that golden egg that started it all: the dream skateboard deck graphic project. B x