Watch
A day or two inside the thing before drawing anything. Half of what I have ever fixed turned up in that first day and was not in the brief.
I turn ideas into things you can feel.
Designer and occasional developer. I work on identity, editorial and the kind of product design where somebody has to sit in a shed and watch how the work really happens.
Selected work
Three projects, written up properly.
Field NotesIdentity · Editorial2025Common GroundProduct · Interaction2024Index StudioType · Tooling2023
Hover a project, or tab through them, to see it here and light its object above.
Plates
Six pieces, out of context.
Type
Set it yourself.
Ideas made tangible
How I work
Four stages, and one of them is watching.
Narrow
Write down what the work actually has to do, in one page, and get it agreed. Most disagreements arrive later disguised as taste.
Make badly
Rough, fast, in the real medium. Paper if it is print, a browser if it is a screen. Beautiful too early is expensive to abandon.
Finish properly
The last ten per cent is the job: the kerning, the empty state, the page nobody was going to check. That is where the work stops being a mock-up.
Worked with
Small institutions, mostly.
Coastal Survey GroupAshfield AllotmentsIndex Type FoundryNorthgate LibraryThe Harbour TrustWren & SonsPeninsula PressQuarry Bank MillFieldwork Journal
Invented clients on a concept site. None of these organisations exist.
Talks and teaching
Mostly about looking before drawing.
2026The shed method: research without a budgetDesign Matters, Copenhagen
2025Typesetting data nobody wants to readTypographics, New York
2025Visiting tutor, MA Graphic DesignRoyal College of Art
2024Eleven years of allotment minutesBristol Design Festival
What I do
Four things, done properly.
- Identity and art direction
- Editorial and print
- Product and interaction design
- Front-end build, when it helps
Twelve years, four of them in a studio and the rest on my own. I take three or four projects a year, which is fewer than I could and about as many as I can do well.
I like problems where the constraint is real: a committee that disagrees, a budget that will not stretch, a material that behaves how it wants. The work gets better when something is pushing back.
Availability
Taking one project from March, and one from September.
Send what you have: a brief, a sketch, a complaint about the current thing. If the work is not right for me I will say so within a week and name two people who would do it better.
March 2026 — one identity or editorial project, eight to twelve weeks.
September 2026 — one product or interaction project, longer engagement.
Concept site. There is no real inbox at the other end of this.