I’m a designer who codes with over 20 years of experience across graphic design, interface design and web engineering. Think of me as a design engineer: the glue between design possibility and technical reality to make the experience whole.
From vision to details and back again, my job is to build beautifully designed hypertext interfaces that work in the blink of an eye, creating the most valued currency—trust.
Currently, I work as a frontend engineer & designer at Vana, an AI start-up in San Francisco. Prior to this, I built Cleared from initial commit through to its sale. In the 00s, I worked as a brand designer at Saatchi & Saatchi, London . You can still find my turn-of-the-century brand work in Australian supermarkets.
I taught myself to code so I could close the gap between XXX. Nowadays, I mostly update production, not design files.
I collect music of all kinds and used to run multiple vinyl record labels. I’ve lived in 3 countries and 8 cities. Home is now tropical Cairns, Australia with my wife and children.
The value of good design is only realised if you have an engineer capable of discerning the details in code (or if you’re lucky, they’re one and the same).Jim Nielsen
TLDR; taste + scenius + tempo + teamwork = leverage.
A decade as graphic designer and a decade as frontend engineer gives me a unique take: I use code as a design tool to get as close as possible to the nitty gritty of the medium. Making it work and making it smooth is always a matter of being open to discovering and wrangling with context and nuance. This is what I love doing.
Neither code nor design is the point. Materialising ideas is. I think there is no substitute for the journey of forming personal taste by paying attention to the world and making ideas real. To make sense and see further, write. Or draw. Continuously.
I believe that teamwork scenius is an underrated secret. Not only shared instincts but mutual at-handedness, it greases the wheels for speed as well as tuning peripheral visions for orientation. As such, I work with people first. Ideas and their systems naturally follow.
I live in tropical Cairns, Australia (GMT+10). Too hard? Book a call.