The work I do
Nearly a decade of experience across design systems, visual identity, UI craft, and creative leadership has given me a clear point of view: the most valuable thing a senior designer can do is create the conditions for good design to happen consistently — not just deliver it themselves.
At Skipton Building Society I did both. I architected a design system used across four brands and seven audience segments. I helped lead the creative team through a full organisation-wide rebrand, acting as the bridge between the brand team’s vision and the practical reality of implementing it across web, app, customer portal, and CRM simultaneously. I ran creative reviews, set quality standards, trained and onboarded team members, and directed agency and freelancer output from brief to delivery.
Staying close to the craft
I also stayed close to the work throughout. I write HTML, CSS, and Liquid. I helped conduct user research. I built and governed an experimentation framework that scaled from five to forty A/B tests per year within twelve months.
Design leaders who lose touch with the work lose credibility with the teams they’re trying to lead.
How I work
My approach is built on process, not improvisation. I think about how work moves through a team before I think about how it looks — briefs, reviews, handoffs, governance, documentation. Good process is what stops good design becoming a bottleneck.
I’m equally fluent with AI tools as part of that process — not as a shortcut, but as a way to accelerate exploration, draft variations, and free up time for the decisions that actually need human judgement.
Underneath all of that, an honest take I’ve held for a long time: anyone can make something that looks good. The interesting part is making something that works — that answers the brief, functions under pressure, and doesn’t fall apart the first time someone opens it in Outlook 2007. Constraints aren’t the enemy of creativity. They’re what makes the craft worth respecting.
How I got here
I came up through print before I moved digital — which taught me discipline, precision, and the kind of attention to detail that doesn’t survive sloppy thinking. That grounding makes me a better digital designer.
My background is unusual. I’ve operated across financial services, B2C and B2B audiences, and the full complexity of a large regulated organisation. I know what it means to design for real constraints — technical, regulatory, organisational, and human.
Outside the day job
Typography is my thing — professionally, obviously, but also at weekends when I’m doing traditional signwriting and printmaking, getting ink and paint on things that absolutely didn’t need it but obviously look better for it. When I’m not doing that, I’m in the Lake District with my family, which does an excellent job of putting kerning debates into perspective.
I have the letter B tattooed on both knees. Typographic pun. I regret nothing.
