About
Hi!
I am the child of two accountants. All four of us siblings are some kind of designer, so we joke that two wrongs can make a right. Hi to all those very important financial type people out there...
Design is in our blood, the meaty practical kind where we love having a problem to solve. MacGyver was my favourite TV show when I was a kid, and in my family, we have a name for 'there, I fixed it' genius fixes: fashioning. For some reason, I am really good at untangling things like shoelaces and balls of yarn (and perhaps also the thoughts of a Product Manager).
I am extremely curious - about people, about things, everything (except football). This has proved useful for product design - I am so interested in how people experience things. When it comes to meeting new people, I am just plain nosey and I have a very strong small talk game.
So... tell me about you. Do you have a dog? What’s your favourite things to eat?


I love:
- Food
- Dogs
- Nice people
- Museums and art galleries
- Crochet and other crafty pursuits
- City break holidays
- Engineering documentaries
- Being the person to bore other people with 'fun' facts
- Bulleted lists
Don't get me started on:
- Raisins
- Monkeys dressed as humans
- Misuse of the possessive apostrophe
- Any type of critter which eats my plants
- When a package isn't opened from the top
My experience
I am currently a Senior Product Designer at Granicus - previously Simpleview, and Eventsforce before that (one job, three companies due to acquisitions). I work in sprints with the Developers and Product Managers to create new products, and enhance the experience of the existing data reporting and events organising product technology.
As a Senior Product Designer, I:
- Work directly with Product Managers on new features, and refinements
- Create Figma mockups of ideas, and high fidelity designs ready for development
- Collaborate with Developers on solutions and compromises
- Consult with Account Managers if they have customers with niche needs and questions
When I look at it as a list it doesn't seem like much, and I think that's because there's so much between the lines that I just do and take for granted - the initiative involved with getting things done and talking to whoever needs to be talked to whenever it is necessary.
A Product manager says 'We need this thing to do this' and I say 'Okay no problem' and then it happens.
Previously at Fin-Ex, I was Senior Digital Designer and responsible for the visual brand and assets for seven of the eight companies that make up Fin-Ex's portfolio because I was the only designer.
This means that I did whatever was needed across the various teams - website design, packaging, logo and branding design from scratch for new companies, paper form design.... I loved it. There was never a chance to feel bored.
I have also been a Web Content Manager for a tour operator, and a Senior Designer at a web design agency.
Outside of a paying job, I am a museum volunteer, model and I was a charity shop assistant.
Before Fin-ex I worked for Blackbaud Europe. In 2014 I was brought into Blackbaud's Peer to Peer fundraising UK client services team.
Initially a tiny team of just a technical consultant and I, we grew from a £0 revenue business to bringing in £1,000,000 in 2018 and adding three more members to our team.
At the start of the transition to the new services team, I created new design concepts that helped clients visualise their requirements for their projects, enabling the Sales team to then find new opportunities and therefore grow the team significantly over the years.
As Senior Interactive Designer there, I worked in small teams where I was the only designer, or one of two designers where we were each responsible for our own projects.
This means that I have been involved in almost every bit of creating a website from scratch:
- Help to sell the project
- Consult directly with the customer
- Mock up a design and deal with questions and design iterations
- Make decisions about when a design is ready for the customer (ie. the Creative Director hat)
- Build the design in a CMS or from scratch with HTML and CSS
- Create new brands, and then refine the ideas for use on- and off-line
- Test of the finished website and its functionality
- Provide post-project support
- Write supporting documentation
- Make an excellent cup of tea
Skills
They’re buzzwords for good reason:
Product design
- UX / UI design
- Website design
- Mobile responsive design
- Data visualisation design
- Data report design
- AI interface design
- CMS interface design
- Prototypes
- User flow wireframes
- User testing
Design
- Design patterns, design kits & component libraries
- Accessibility best practices
- Graphic design
- Branding
- Iconography
- Client interaction
Platforms and methodologies
- Figma
- Jira
- Agile methodology
- Adobe Creative Suite
- Bootstrap
- Wordpress
- HTML
- CSS
- Material UI
I play well with others
Relationships are really important to me, especially in the work environment - most of my oldest closest friends are people who I have worked with over the years.
We spend all this time together so why not be nice and have fun with it? I'm not the kind of person to only speak to someone because I want something from them (and I prefer that others not do that to me).
Life's too short to be unpleasant.
I have had great experience working with other teams in the company:
- Helping the Marketing team to trouble shoot their website issues, proof-read material before it goes out, and provide artwork when they've needed a helping hand
- Assisting the Sales team with answering customer questions and make sales, provide work estimates and realistic quotes
- Creating site page mock-ups for the Sales team so that they had imagery and user flows to help with their customer meetings
- Working through questions and issues with product Consultants
- Helping the Services team to write water-tight Scopes of Work
- Working directly alongside Developers in an agile environment to make sure that our solutions look good and work well
- Collaborating with the Product Manager to make sure that my solutions are practical and possible
- Working with the Support team to troubleshoot and fix unusual or design- and build-related issues
- Mentoring and/or support another Designer
- Working with the company CEO on the company's design vision
- Helping to refine internal platforms and software by spotting bugs and making recommendations to the Products team
About my website
I didn’t use AI (other than Actual Intelligence) in the creation of this site - only because I like doing the things for which AI is super useful. I like writing, and get secretly excited when I have to write up some documentation.
This site was built using just a Frankensteining of Bootstrap templates and a text editor.
Why? Because I can.
Building HTML and CSS is no longer part of my job as a Senior Product Designer, and I enjoy the process of creating with code... the sense of achievement, satisfaction, and learning something new every time. It was a great opportunity to blow the cobwebs out of my codey brain, and I really enjoyed it.
As a result, there are bits of wonkiness in my pages and that's because it was made by a human.
And what is product design if not humans making human things for other humans?