I’m a British graphic designer specialising in interaction design and front-end web development. Currently freelancing, I was previously a designer at the Guardian, and before that Clearleft, a Brighton-based user experience agency. I led the design of webfont service Fontdeck and co-founded Multipack, a community for web designers and developers in Birmingham.

Background

I grew up in Surrey in south east England before spending my teenage years in Walsall, a town near Birmingham in the West Midlands.

In 1999 I moved to Carlisle to study Graphic Design at Cumbria Institute of the Arts, but upon completion of my degree, quickly returned home.

In 2004 I joined Orange Vision, a small web marketing agency based in Lichfield, where I led the company’s adoption of web standards and accessible design practices.

Eighteen months later, and through a series of seemingly unconnected events, I found myself moving to the United States to take on the Lead Designer role at Ning, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California co-founded by Marc Andreessen. My design direction and standards guidance for its social web applications helped the company become host to the largest number of social networks on the Internet. In retrospect, this short time in the US was an incredibly formative period of my life.

As Baz Luhrmann sang, you should live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. In 2008 I returned to Britain to embark on a period of freelancing, working with technology start-ups including nGenera Corporation and Apture. In June 2009, I joined Clearleft full-time as a Visual Designer, working for clients such as Channel 4, BBC, NBCUniversal, Dennis Publishing, UNICEF UK and eBay. At the end of 2013 I moved to the Guardian, where I worked on the organisation’s next generation digital products, before going in freelance in 2015.

Outside of work I like to travel – I’m slowing adventuring into non-English speaking countries – and maintain a keen interest in British and American politics.