Piers Baker - Director and Cartoonist
Piers Baker is a pioneering cartoonist, illustrator and whiteboard animator, bringing Doodle Ads and explainer videos to the UK back in 2004.
Known for his distinctive style and a consistently high quality of work, Piers has produced over 2,000 whiteboard videos with his creative team.
He was a co-founder of Doodle Ads in 2012 which popularised the industry’s use of Doodle Ad as a generic term. In 2017, he established Doodle Whiteboard which works with many clients globally - in the USA, UK, the South Pacific and Europe - producing videos that convey complex ideas in an accessible visual video form and in multiple languages.
Piers is an established cartoonist, with his cartoon strip Ollie and Quentin syndicated worldwide by New York’s King Features Syndicate. Ollie and Quentin is a buddy comic about the friendship between a seagull called Ollie and an adventurous lugworm called Quentin. The duo are chums, despite the obvious food chain disparity that suggests Ollie should be more interested in Quentin as a snack than as a friend.
Ollie and Quentin appear every day on GoComics.com and their antics have been published in a book, Ollie and Quentin: An hilarious comic strip about the unlikely friendship between a Seagull and a Lugworm available on Amazon.
Before this, Piers worked with publishing houses - including Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press - illustrating educational books for children and participating in national projects including The Big Draw with Sir Quentin Blake.
Going further back, and after time at Epsom School of Art in Surrey, England, Piers began his career in an advertising agency.
He then launched his own graphic design firm, focusing on food packaging design. His speciality was creating ice lolly wrappers for Wall's Ice Cream including the iconic Twister, Feast, Funny Faces, Fat Frog, Funny Feet and Split.
“I have been making ‘Doodle Ad’ explainer videos for over 20 years, and drawing cartoons since I was eight, though I can’t remember a time when I didn’t draw. Hailing from a family of artists and draughtsmen my mother always said I was born with a pencil in my hand and lead in my veins. Maybe that’s why my parents gave me my name with the initials ‘Pb’ - which is Lead in the Periodic Table of Chemical Elements.”
As a teenager, during a year volunteering in Egypt, Piers survived a plane crash.
Standing six-feet-six inches tall, Piers was a champion 400 metre runner in his youth.
Piers was an 'extra' in the 1981 Oscar-winning British film Chariots of Fire, appearing in the iconic Trinity College Great Courtyard Run scene.
Piers rides an electric unicycle.
Piers lives in a 16th century former carriage store in the Renaissance City of Florence, Italy.