Hi, I’m James Kurian — designer at IBM, in India

Systems thinker. Problem solver. Designer.

I’m nine years into this, and about five of those have been spent inside banks — which is where I learned that the interesting problem is almost never the one on the screen in front of you. I built and ran the design system behind TSB’s mobile app; these days I’m redesigning internet banking at Nationwide. The work I like best sits in the gap between design and engineering, where the honest answer turns out to be a system rather than a screen.

See the case studies More about me

Designer, occasional team photographer, full-time staff to one cat.

Years designing: 09
Of those in banking: 05+
Industries: Banking · Retail · Energy distribution · Consumer electronics

What I actually do

Design systems

Component architecture and API design
Token systems and theming
Governance, contribution and versioning
Documentation designers will read
Migration off legacy libraries

Product design

End-to-end journeys, discovery to launch
Prototyping and usability testing
Competitor and heuristic analysis
Working inside regulated constraints
Accessibility to WCAG 2.2 AA

How I work with teams

Pairing directly with engineers
Turning research into decisions
Design QA against the build
Mentoring and design critique
Making the case to stakeholders

Brands I’ve designed for

Selected case studies

Three pieces of work, written up properly: what the problem was, what I tried, what shipped, and what it moved. All three are client work under NDA, so the write-ups are encrypted — the password unlocks all of them at once.