Design Focus

Direction & context

With two decades of web and product design experience and a background in cultural studies and critical thinking, I bring unique insight to your team or project.

Super thoughtful, broad surfaces in his work, and multi-disciplinary. This kind of experience, that touches various parts of design, is valuable.

Experienced and flexible

I’ve designed digital experiences for govs, banks, airlines, tech giants, record labels, publishers, and charities, and no two situations have been the same. I’m comfortable working on my own and in localised or distributed teams.

An artist’s eye

I trained as a visual and conceptual artist, and this insight has informed much of my design career. In my day-to-day work, I’m particularly attuned to composition, harmony and balance, and I’m able to draw on timeless art and design principles. Philosophically, I believe that designers should care for culture and humanities, draw from a vast array of diverse inputs and find multiple ways of seeing.

Focused direction, global context

I’m interested in all aspects of the design process and can draw on extensive experience at every stage. As a short or long-term design director, I keep teams focused and ensure we measure progress against agreed principles and purpose. Alongside this focus, I also strive to build awareness of local and global culture and change, and how the work fits into multiple contexts. Nothing should happen in a bubble.

I’ve always been a bit of a generalist, and I make no apology for that — it enabled me to slot into a variety of scenarios where needed. With a clearly defined role, my approach will be focused and strategic.

Systems and libraries

I have a holistic approach to design systems rooted more in traditional graphic design philosophies than the current trend for meticulous component libraries.

That said, I do enjoy formalising the core aspects of a product and its patterns, and devising shared visual grammar. I believe digital products benefit best from a progressive, layered design system that establishes a handful of strict rules at its core and affords increasing levels of expression as one moves outward.

I think that a robust design system should support a wide variety of often unforeseeable needs by keeping everything anchored but unchained.

Designing with code

I’m a designer, but I’ve always enjoyed working with code. I particularly love designing in the browser and consider CSS a brilliant tool for design exploration. As one of the original web standards advocates, I’m most comfortable working with HTML and CSS (about which I wrote a bestseller in 2006), but I can also do a few things with JS and manipulate content with PHP.

Whether the work is CMS or something much simpler like a rapid prototype, I tend to work within a straightforward local environment, mirroring to portable devices for RWD testing. I preprocess all my CSS, and I organise assets and fonts with a thoughtful but not overwhelming neatness. Everything runs through Git, and I deploy using DeployHQ.

The idea is that I can grant access to anything I’m working on, and the work is independent of the environment and thus always portable.

Designing with software

I do occasionally get asked about specific tools. I’m always interested in new tools but tend to wait a while to see what takes off. In case you're interested:

For a long time, Sketch was my primary design software, but I now prefer Figma. I’m happy using either tool for product design and prototyping (I also like InVision), and I tend to lean on linked libraries. When collaborating, I might version with Abstract, and sometimes use Sketch Cloud or Figma's team tools; perhaps InVision’s Freehand for whiteboarding. For image work, I now use Affinity Photo, though I’ve long been fluent with Photoshop and Illustrator.

As noted further up, I love designing in the browser (Firefox, these days). I like digging deep with inspection tools and iterating with Sass. My text editor is Atom, and I version with Git.