I worked with the agency Fueled between 2011–2019, becoming their first design hire as they navigated the App Store goldrush of the early '10s. Across the decade I helped build and lead the design team. Together we created brands and experiences for new startups and enterprise-level organisations alike.
Home Box Office
During the early years of Game of Thrones, I was tasked with coming up with creative ways to support the rising popularity of the series. This involved engaging the community they'd already built, and also attracting new followers. Ideas ranged from gamification to companion experiences that took you deeper into the world as you watched. We landed on a map game in the Foursquare mould: your own city redrawn as Westeros on parchment, checking in to claim ground for your house.
Every texture was painted by hand—banner cloth, carved-stone badges, a wisdom meter—because in those years an app earned its fantasy pixel by pixel.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Fueled had worked on a new keyless check-in experience for MGM Resorts on the Las Vegas strip. Shortly after the initial release designed by Alex Lockey, MGM committed to a rebrand. Using their new guidelines, I revamped and aligned with their new web experience to ensure consistency across all platforms. The app became the front desk in your pocket—pick the room, choose your check-in hour, book the evening's table—set in their muted gold and given room to breathe.
Hospitality interfaces earn trust through restraint: the fewer the flourishes, the more expensive it feels.
9GAG
Prekesh Chavda and I redesigned their entire iOS experience. We touched core principles; clearer voting mechanisms, easier creation of content, offline browsing, and a simplified navigation. The discipline was staying out of the way: the memes are the interface, so the chrome went quiet and the feed became big cards you could vote on without thinking.
Designing the quietest possible UI for the loudest content on the internet remains a favourite brief.
Bulova
Inner shadows and gradients! Prior to iOS7, these things existed. Bulova tasked us to come up with the fanciest alarm and world clock on the App Store, so I spent hours meticulously recreating their lovely watchfaces for the iPhone. Every bezel screw, chronograph dial and glow of lume was drawn by hand, one layer style at a time, until the Marine Star read as metal on a 3.5-inch screen.
Peak skeuomorphism—a school of craft I'm glad to have practised right up until the industry threw it away.
Public
Née Matador. The more social Stocks, ETF and Crypto investing app. I worked on the founding design of their app that launched the company and propelled them against the heavyweights. The bet was that a feed belongs in a brokerage: your friends' trades sitting beside the candlesticks, in a black-and-white interface that lets the green and the red do the talking.
Years before copy-trading went mainstream, that felt genuinely new.
Others I had the pleasure of working with over the years: Barneys New York, Compass, Crayola, Crunchbase, Glamour, Hagerty, Harvard, Nimble, Owners, Rdio, RiteAid and Xponential.