In 2020, I stepped back from design to concentrate on development. Before that, I’d designed most of the websites I built. I enjoyed both, but I wanted to give one discipline my full attention and see how far I could take it.
At the time, it felt like a good opportunity. There was plenty I wanted to learn, and trying to get better at everything at once was spreading that effort quite thinly. I wanted a stronger understanding of how things worked, more confidence with difficult builds and the experience to make better technical decisions.
I’m glad I gave myself that time. But in 2025, I started making a conscious effort to bring design back into my work. Harbour Roastery and Wilder & Root were part of that return. They reminded me how much I enjoy taking an idea from a brief through to an identity and a website.
Where design started for me
I started taking design seriously around 2010, although I’d liked making and designing things before then. My work has covered application interfaces, websites, logos and wider brand identities. Figma, Illustrator and Photoshop have all been part of that process.
Application design is probably the part closest to my heart. I’ve worked on large projects for companies building software for banks and large organisations, as well as bespoke software for smaller businesses. I like working through how a product should behave, especially when the job it needs to do is complicated.
There’s a lot of satisfaction in making something easier to understand. A person should be able to open an application, find what they need and get on with their day. Getting there can involve a surprising amount of thought about a label, the order of a form or which information belongs on a particular screen.
Making room for design again
Harbour Roastery gave me room to work across the whole visual identity. I designed the logo, typography, colour direction and website, using the harbour and lighthouse as starting points for the brand.
The brief brought together coffee, craft and coastal life. I wanted the website to carry that character while still doing the practical jobs: introducing the roastery, showing the food and coffee, and helping someone understand where it was and what they could expect. The coastal colours and café photography were part of the same story as the logo.
I enjoyed being able to follow those decisions through. A logo on its own can only tell you so much. Seeing it alongside the typography, photographs and page layouts makes it much easier to judge whether everything belongs together.
Wilder & Root brought a different set of questions. It’s a brand and ecommerce design for plant-based meal delivery, so the identity had to work alongside a useful shopping experience. I worked on the logo, type, colours and layouts for the homepage, product listing and individual product pages.
That meant thinking about someone choosing a meal, rather than only looking at a design. The food imagery, dietary information and ordering actions needed to be easy to follow. My development experience helped here because I was already thinking about how those layouts would work with real products and different amounts of content.
Elsewhere in my design work, Sophie Kate Photography shows another side of what I enjoy. The identity began with Sophie’s signature, and the website gives her photographs space while keeping clear routes into weddings, equestrian photography and portraits. It’s a good example of how much the subject should influence the design.
The details have a job to do
I’m drawn to minimal design. I like a page with a clear purpose, well-considered spacing and the right message in the right place. Giving an important sentence room can do more than adding another section or visual effect.
I can get fairly obsessive about the details. The gap between a heading and a paragraph matters because it tells you what belongs together. The wording on a button matters because someone has to decide whether to press it. Those small choices add up to the way a website or application feels.
Before getting too far into layouts, I want to understand the client, their customers and the problem we’re trying to solve. I want a clear brief, with an agreed purpose and a sense of what success would look like. Otherwise, it’s very easy to spend a lot of time polishing the wrong thing.
User personas and site maps help me work through that. Thinking about who will use something, what they need and how they will move through it gives the design a reason to take a particular shape. It also gives us something useful to refer back to when decisions get difficult.
To me, good design is at the heart of the whole experience. That includes the visual identity, but it also includes finding an answer, buying a product, recovering from an error or knowing what happens after submitting a form. The customer experiences all of it together.
AI makes judgement more important
The rise of AI has made me think more carefully about where I put my time. I still want to be a strong developer, and I also want to broaden the skills that support that work. Design, accessibility, usability and good engineering practice all belong in that picture.
I can see an opportunity to learn and experiment more quickly. But being able to produce something quickly leaves plenty of decisions to make. I still need to understand the problem, question the assumptions and decide whether what I’m looking at is actually useful.
I believe critical thinking is more important than ever. If a tool produces a plausible answer, I need enough understanding to challenge it. If it produces a polished interface, I need to look beyond that first impression and consider how someone will use it, including someone whose needs are different from mine.
That’s part of why I want to diversify. The years spent concentrating on development gave me a foundation I can build on. Now I want to get better at the decisions around the code as well.
One product, one experience
Being a better designer helps me be a better developer. I notice more, ask better questions and understand the intention behind a layout. Development helps my design work too, because I know that an interface has to cope with loading, empty states, errors, different devices and content that changes.
The person using the product doesn’t experience design and development as separate disciplines. They experience whether it makes sense and whether it works. I want to be able to think about both throughout a project.
Returning to design is a way of widening my skills in a direction that already feels close to me. I enjoy the work, I care about the details, and I’ve missed giving that part of the process proper time. It feels like a natural next step from the development work I’ve spent the last few years concentrating on.