Designer (Interaction/UX/UI) based in Manchester, England
This morning I shook off a bit of low-level anxiety and broke a stubborn habit by going to an in-person conference in Leeds. A lovely city in the North of England I don’t get to often enough. On the train home, experiencing that peculiar mix of elation and exhaustion that arrives when the music stops and the party ends, I’m reflecting on what made it a brilliant day and why I’ve let opportunities…
I've always enjoyed reading end-of-year summaries—you know the kind, where actual people reflect on what they've read, watched, listened to, or been otherwise occupied with over the year. I've discovered great recommendations this way and appreciated them all the more because they felt personal, especially compared with the flat-packed recaps currently in vogue. It's something I've wanted to do…
At the end of 2024, a period of reflection on my professional life and relationship with technology—from both sides of the glass: as a user and sometime worker in the industry—led me to start this digital garden project as a way to reconnect with work I find meaningful and engaging, helping me reset my professional identity based on my own interests. As summer gives way to autumn, a natural time…
When I first built and released the latest iteration of this website with Eleventy in January 2025, my workflow went something like this: to make changes, I would run the dev server locally with npm run dev , then when I was happy, I'd trigger a build with npm run build , which produces a production-ready build in the _site directory. package.json { "type" : "module" , "scripts" : { "dev" :…
Building on my experience creating a digital music library with Eleventy and APIs , I wanted to apply similar principles and lessons learned to organise my book collection. Creating a digital bookshelf with a static site generator isn't particularly new or original. Many similar projects and write-ups already exist. This one simply documents my personal approach. The OpenLibrary API Several…
Back in December 2024, while I was doing the usual end-of-year contemplation, Spotify's annual Wrapped feature arrived, ringing a bell in my mind. I realised my scattershot listening habits on Spotify and the snapshot Wrapped presents failed to capture my changing tastes over time or evoke feelings and memories in the same way as a tangible music collection. Music is a fundamental part of my…
Designers often seem to face extremes when selecting and using colours. At one end of the spectrum, brand guidelines limit you to a few colours chosen for specific applications, with additional colours added later—sometimes purely for aesthetics or where the reasons are unclear. Some of the colours might have tints and shades while others don't, and where variations exist, there could be…
Last year was a weird one—in fact, it's more accurate to say the entire period since the COVID-19 pandemic has been a distinctly odd time. I can’t recall any time in my career—which spans long enough to include the dot-com crash of 2000 (yes, I'm that old) and the fallout from the financial crisis of 2007–2008—when workers have been stretched and squeezed so hard, for so long, in all directions. A…