More about me
I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember. As a kid, it was what people knew me for. I could spend hours trying to get a shape right, and I still can. It might be a letterform, an interface, or the geometry of a bicycle frame. I’m interested in the decisions that give something its form.
If I hadn’t become a designer, I might have gone into illustration, concept art, or architecture. I like imagining things and figuring out how to make them real. In a way, I’m just inventing machines for the real world.
I don’t really separate designing from making. For me, they’re the same activity. A decision changes the thing you’re making; making it changes the decisions you take. I love the craft as much as the result: drawing, prototyping, learning a technique, getting something wrong, and trying again. Design is organising decisions. I’m just not organising all of them.
Over time, I’ve also come to see design as more than a profession. People have been shaping tools, spaces, and ways of living for as long as we’ve been human. The things we make reflect our needs, but also the ideas and power structures of the time we live in. Design doesn’t happen outside society, and neither do designers.
That shapes how I think about work. Making something easy to use isn’t automatically the same as making it good for people. I don’t have a tidy answer to every ethical question, but I think it’s important to keep asking who benefits, who decides, and what choices people really have.
As a manager, I try to create the conditions for people to do good work. People deserve those conditions because they’re people, not just because they’ll be more productive. I care about craft, accountability, and honesty. A team should be able to challenge each other, including me, without losing trust. And when someone struggles, I want to understand what’s happening before reducing them to a performance problem. We’re not machines.
I have little patience for design culture that exists only in presentations. A company can have all the right frameworks and still make poor decisions. I’d rather look at its incentives, who has a voice, whether people can disagree with authority, and what actually gets made. Creativity is repeatable, but not predictable. Process can support it; process can’t replace it.
I enjoy helping other designers grow, but I want to keep making things myself. I’m not particularly interested in collecting titles. What matters to me is having the time, the people, and the freedom to do good work and to put more of it out into the world.