Portfolio
Whilst not holding formal design positions, in most roles I've found the opportunity to do design work in some capacity, ranging from designing user flows, to wireframes and high fidelity mockups. Here is a small sampling of things I've worked on.
Fronted (2020 – 2023)
Backoffice
Efficient operational workflows were critical to the viability of the business. As such, we invested heavily in our backoffice to streamline common tasks as much as possible — replacing an existing cornucopia of 3rd party tools.
I produced these designs (derived from Tailwind UI's visual language) in an effort to elevate the UX and make the overall backoffice application more appealing to work in. A dramatic shift in business priorities meant these weren't ultimately shipped, but the implementation was close to completion.
- Figma
- Tailwind UI
- Django / Python
“Lifetime Deposit” app UI exploration
This project presented some challenging UI problems. We needed to find a way to communicate the state of the movement of money between up to 4 parties as part of a multi-step process. Part of the problem came from our desire to keep things simple for customers, whilst not having all the partnerships and integrations necessary to make a seamless experience possible. It made it difficult to settle on the appropriate level of abstraction.
In the end, owing to a combination of these challenges and some regulatory decisions, we shifted our focus back to a simpler (and web-based) model which didn't attempt to obfuscate the underlying finanical primitive (a loan).
- Figma
- React Native
Zego (2017 – 2020)
Landing page design system
We had a set of landing page layouts which were used to tailor our messaging towards particular customer cohorts. The process of building these was a heavily manual time sink for engineers, and the designs of the pages were dated and not a reflection of our current brand; so I set out to propose a new system for CMS-driven pages. There were two main goals with this project:
- A new design language for landing pages that was a marked improvement over the current one, and could support wide range of audiences and messages.
- A new CMS to allow rapid development of new pages and experimentation with their content.
Having just completing some research into the current CMS ecosystem, as well as having recently built a simple in-house CMS for our company blog, I had a good sense of what kind of page layouts would be possible and what customisation options would be available. My leading candidate for the CMS was Sanity.
- Figma
- React Native
Micro-interactions
During my time at Zego, I had the opportunity to work on some micro-interactions. The general motivation behind these was to add a bit of delight to otherwise uninteresting bits of UI, as well as reinforcing a sense of place within the application or website layouts.
There were generally designed and developed in-place, rather than using a separate design tool -— often requiring that I learn an unfamiliar set of animation APIs in the process.
- Framer Motion
- Reanimated
- React
- React Native
Personal site redesign (2019)
Whilst developing the current design of my personal site, I explored the possibility of allowing each article page to have a custom theme. I didn't end up implementing this, but it remains an approach I'd like to revisit in the future as it harkens back to an era of the web that I remember fondly — where designers were exploring the idea of more explicitly building the layout of individual content pages around the needs of the content itself.
The approach I considered wasn't as ambitious as allowing full control over layout on a per-article basis, as I considered the overhead to be too great; but customising colours, imagery and typography was on the cards.
- Sketch
- React
- Gatsby
- Next.js