Design Kings, UK Top Designers

Collaboration is key at Preloaded, and they don't have job titles. Paul Canty takes care of much of the client-facing part of the business, and acts as spokesman for the rest of the design team.

Canty says his experience of working in an advertising agency has made him want to work in a more fluid way. "There's a dramatic lack of talent out there, certainly in the big agencies," he says. Tall and shaven-headed, Canty trained as a painter at Central St Martin's College of Art before joining Noho Digital Studio, where he met Rob Corradi.

Blue-haired Corradi studied film at Portsmouth University, where he discovered he wasn't good at film, but was good at multimedia creation. Phil Stuart, at 23 is the youngest of the Preloaded posse; He is a former student of Visual Communication at Surrey Institute. His philosophy web design is "keep it simple".

Preloaded's office in London's ultra trendy Hoxton Square is a dream for location scouts looking for that authentic web design agency look. The place is full of retro electronics, including an original 1960's Sony Trinitron, an Atari VCS, two arcade games cabinets in working order and an old Speak n Spell toy.

Preloaded's clients are mainly in the music sector EMI, MTV and promo producer Hammer and Tongs but the company has also produced yourstruthfully.com, an anonymous email service for advertising agency Mother, and runs a portal for the web design community linkdup.com, Not a bad track record for a company which started trading just over a year ago.

Originally published in Internet Business Magazine, April 2001. Text James Snodgrass.