Rick Dickinson

Rick Dickinson was a British industrial designer whose work gave Sinclair's early home computers their distinctive physical identity. After graduating from Newcastle Polytechnic with first-class honours in Design for Industry, he joined Sinclair in 1979 as its in-house designer.

Dickinson helped take the ZX80 case into production, then designed the ZX81's compact black enclosure and touch-sensitive keyboard. The ZX81 won a British Design Council award and showed how careful industrial design could make an inexpensive computer feel like a coherent consumer product.

For the ZX Spectrum, Dickinson created the small black case, rainbow motif and famous rubber keyboard. The design had to fit the computer's many BASIC keywords onto forty keys while remaining cheap to manufacture. Its appearance became one of the most recognisable symbols of British home computing.

Dickinson later designed the Sinclair QL and other Sinclair products. After leaving in 1986 he founded Dickinson Associates, working on computers, communications equipment and scientific instruments. Decades later he returned to the Spectrum's design language for the ZX Spectrum Next. He died on 24 April 2018 after treatment for cancer.