Systems thinker. Problem solver. Designer.

How I got here

I started out doing broad digital product work — retail, energy, consumer apps — for brands including Safeway, Majid Al Futtaim, Crompton, Fluvius and BP. That range taught me something specific: the interface problems change completely between industries, but the structural problems almost never do. Every one of those teams was rebuilding the same components and disagreeing about the same edge cases.

Banking is where that lesson became my job. At TSB I moved from designing features to owning the system underneath them, running Orbital as design system manager across four squads and 350-odd people. In parallel I designed mobile cheque deposit end to end, which was a useful corrective — systems work can drift into abstraction, and nothing grounds you faster than watching someone fail to photograph a cheque in bad lighting.

Now I’m at Nationwide, redesigning internet banking: a large desktop estate reaching end of service life, drifting away from the mobile app, and being asked to become properly responsive. I’m doing it as both product designer and design system manager, which means every gap I hit in the NEL design system is also mine to close.

What I believe about this work

A design system is not a component library. The library is the artefact; the system is the agreement about who decides what, and how a change travels. Get the agreement wrong and you will ship a beautiful library that four teams quietly fork within a quarter.

Accessibility belongs in the primitives. If your focus state, contrast and hit areas are correct in the component, nobody downstream has to remember — and nobody downstream reliably remembers. This site is built the same way: one two-stroke focus ring, contrast checked by script rather than by eye.

Numbers matter, but so does saying which ones are still open. Two of the three case studies here have results I can stand behind. The third is mid-flight, and I’ve written it that way.