Jonny Burch

Life after Figma is coming (and it will be glorious)

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

History is full of software winners

Across waves of software cycles in every vertical we've seen dominant platforms that capture the vast majority of the value of a market over time. Workday, Salesforce, Hubspot, Adobe, Zoom, Google. The power law dictates that there will be one or a handful of winners as data, trust and recognition accrues.

This has also so far been true of the design world. From professional print and graphic design in Adobe suite to interface design first in Sketch and then Figma.

Most companies designing interfaces at scale use Figma now, with a reported 90% market share (2023).

Yet their stock is currently 81% down since IPO, and the market for new design tools is experiencing somewhat of a cambrian explosion. The whale is wounded and there's sharks in the water.

But why?

Figma has its own issues. Since the failed sale to Adobe the product strategy has felt rudderless, panicky. For the first time it's not that clear where Figma is headed.

But I think there's something bigger going on. Or several things.

AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code are allowing engineers, and by extension curious or technical designers, to design with code.
Those same tools are getting much better at design. Far from perfect, as any designer who's actually built on vibe coded apps will tell you. But much, much better. And the live prototypes add fidelity in a way static mocks can't
As engineers speed up the bottleneck in any given product team is being felt further up the stack in the design team. In modern teams it's no longer acceptable for a designer to spend 2 weeks in their mind palace creating the perfect UI.

In this new race Figma actually has a disadvantage. They're suddenly the slow incumbent with the wrong tech stack and a large enterprise customer-base adding drag.

So what next?

Here's where it gets exciting.

I don't believe there will be a platform that replaces Figma. Or at least, I don't believe it will be a platform owned by one business.

As product, design and engineering collapse together, design interfaces will start to look more like dependencies in the code itself.

After all, the only correct source of truth is code. Open, shared, with common standards.

And with Git worktrees and virtual machines in the cloud we already have everything we need for true collaborative explorative design. The only remaining piece of the puzzle are the plugins themselves.

The great unbundling

We're already starting to see this happen. Tools like Agentation - redlining with AI superpowers - and Pencil - a full design tool installable as a vscode plugin - suggest a future where design teams interact directly with production code, abstracted away through familiar paradigms.

Vibe coding tools in their many forms also suggest a future where we trust AI with design execution and interact only through intent. Any codebase with a strong design system should no longer need pixel tweaking for most tasks, and designing with your voice feels like flying.

All of this might mean a designer's working day involves some evolution of a development environment, working in lockstep with engineers on exploration, and zero time 'updating the components in Figma'. Bliss.

There's work to do. Installing dependencies, understanding git, interacting with real data and understanding the constraints of data models with millions of database rows is non trivial, and that complexity must be paid down.

But it all feels solvable in time. And in the meantime there's nothing to stop the design tooling ecosystem starting to feel like what our comrades in software engineering have enjoyed for years: choice. Hundreds or thousands of choices across frameworks, languages and code packages maintained by both for profit and open source maintainers. Not built in a paid product marketplace, but open on the web.

Hell, we'll be building our own design tools, as individuals and companies. (Case in point: this week I built a webGL shader tool in 15 minutes to create a single effect for a website.)

And with choice comes more heterogeneous outcomes and maybe, just maybe, the most liberating time to be a designer in decades.

I can't wait to see what we create.

I'm tracking design tooling at designtools.fyi - let me know if I'm missing one or you'd like to contribute

Read previous thoughts on product design:

Browser wars

Wed, 22 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It seems like the Browser wars are back. And this time it's the battle of the chatbots.

The modern day darling of 'trying to mix up the browser', The Browser Company of New York, struck an initial chord with Arc a few years back (it became my default browser for no other reason than it was prettier than Chrome), then a bit of a miss with Dia. That said, my new mac this week was the first that I didn't download Chrome onto, choosing Dia this time round.

But I also dipped into Comet (Perplexity's browser) — a free annual account courtesy Lenny's newsletter was enough to tempt me.

Then yesterday, openAI announced chatGPT Atlas. I gave it a whirl.

First impressions

First of all, I quite like chatGPT Atlas. It doesn't have the 'profiles' feature thaat Chrome, Dia et al have, which I would personally need to be my daily driver. But it's really nicely executed, the shiny overlay when the browser is being automated by openAI is pretty, and it feels like a logical progression in the move up the stack to being the new front page of the internet.

But I found that by moving what I've always compartmentalised as a website (chatGPT) onto the browser layer, I felt a bit of cognitive dissonance that I hadn't with Perplexity or Dia's chats.

chatGPT is a browser? Or the browser is chatGPT?

You log in with chatGPT as soon as you fire up the browser, and as a result all your chats — basically your entire chat history — is right there, in your sidebar. That means also that every web search in Atlas that chatGPT deems to be 'a chat' turns up in chatGPT too.

I think I'm ok with this? I feel like my chatGPT sidebar is throwaway enough that I don't mind filling it with random searches. But equally the Dia sidebar which doesn't sync in that way feels nicely compartmentalised.

If I squint I can start to see the productivity gains from seamlessly moving from my memories in chatGPT to my browsing history and back — and this is a great v1. But right now. I dunno. Maybe it's nicer to have different AIs that I talk to about different things. Gemini can improve my writing in Google docs, while Claude handles my conversations about code. Dia is my browsing assistant while chatGPT is my thought buddy.

Network effects tho

You can see why openAI wants to own every gate into the web. They're squeezing the use cases of everyone dropping chat into their apps — both the front door (browser) and data layer (connectors).

OpenAI feels inevitable at this stage. The Thanos of the modern web. Their pace of shipping is out of this world even for the current breed of AI-first companies, and their brand name recognition feels like a won race already.

They even already have a relationship with Apple that may be deep pocketed enough to assert dominance over Google's (paid) placement as default search on Safari. Perhaps Microsoft are the only company with the distribution to compete.

So it wouldn't surprise me if in 2 years time chatGPT browser will be my new default install, on mac, iPhone, and everywhere else. This makes me a bit sad as I have a definite side-eye feeling about Sama and team.

But hey. If my chatbot knows about my search history, maybe it's worth it.

Writing Blog Posts with Claude Code on iOS

Mon, 20 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Note: I wrote none of the below. Read it and you'll understand why. what a strange world we're entering...

There's something delightfully recursive about writing a blog post, on my phone, about how I can now write blog posts on my phone.

When Anthropic announced Claude Code for iOS, I was curious but skeptical. Could a mobile coding experience actually be useful, or was it just a nice-to-have feature that would gather digital dust? After using it to write this very post, I'm pleasantly surprised.

The Context

I've been maintaining this blog as an Astro site for a while now. My typical workflow for creating new posts has involved:

Opening my laptop
Firing up Cursor or another editor
Creating a new markdown file with the right frontmatter
Writing the content
Committing and pushing to Git

It's not complicated, but it requires me to be at my desk with my laptop open. And let's be honest – some of the best ideas come when you're nowhere near your desk.

Enter Claude Code on iOS

The iOS app brings Claude Code's capabilities to my pocket. Not in a watered-down, "mobile-friendly" way, but with full access to the same tools and workflows I use on desktop.

Here's what I can do:

Full Git Integration: I can create branches, commit changes, and push to remote repositories. The app handles all the git operations I'd normally run from the terminal.

File System Access: Claude can navigate my repository, read existing posts to understand the format, and create new files with the proper structure and frontmatter.

Complete Markdown Editing: Writing long-form content on a phone isn't ideal, but Claude helps by understanding context, maintaining consistent voice, and formatting everything correctly.

Real Development Workflow: This isn't just note-taking that I'll clean up later. Claude Code can handle the entire process from creation to deployment.

Writing This Post

To write this post, I:

Opened Claude Code on my iPhone
Asked Claude to explore the blog structure
Told it to write a post about writing posts with Claude Code on iOS
Reviewed and refined the content (yes, meta-inception here)
Committed and pushed to my blog repository

The entire process took maybe 10 minutes. I'm lying on my bed, and this post will be live shortly after I push it.

What's Different About Mobile

The interesting thing isn't just that I can do this on mobile – it's that the experience makes sense. The conversational interface actually works better on a phone than traditional code editors would.

I'm not hunting for menus or struggling with mobile keyboard shortcuts. I'm just having a conversation about what I want to create, and Claude handles the implementation details.

The limitations are real – reviewing large diffs or working with complex file structures isn't ideal on a small screen. But for focused tasks like writing a blog post, editing documentation, or making small updates, it's genuinely useful.

The Broader Implications

This feels like a glimpse of a different way of working. Not replacing desktop development, but complementing it.

I can capture ideas when they're fresh, make quick fixes when I spot issues, or publish content from anywhere. The friction between "having an idea" and "shipping it" just got a lot lower.

It's the kind of tool that seems trivial until you start using it. Then you realize you're creating and shipping things in moments that would have otherwise been lost to "I'll do that when I get to my laptop" (which often means never).

The Meta Layer

There's something fitting about using AI to write about using AI. This post exists because the tool I'm writing about made it possible to write it in the first place.

Is it perfect? No. Did Claude write every word exactly as I'd have written it? Also no. But it captured the essence of what I wanted to express, in my voice, formatted correctly for my blog, committed to the right branch, and ready to publish.

That's pretty remarkable for something I did from my couch on a Sunday afternoon.

What's Next

I'm curious to see how this changes my writing habits. Will I publish more frequently? Write shorter, more immediate posts? Use my phone for more substantial development work?

I don't know yet. But I like that the option is there.

For now, I'm going to commit this post, push it to my blog, and marvel at the fact that I just meta-blogged about meta-blogging from a device in my pocket.

The future is weird, and I'm here for it.

Redrawing the Map: How AI Is Splitting the Future of Product Design

Sat, 13 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This week I attended Hatch Conference in Berlin ostensibly to run a 'Designer to Founder' round table. But really, I was there to immerse myself in the energy of the design community—a community I hadn’t gathered with since speaking at Jam London back in 2019 (ah, pre-covid days).

In the intervening years, I’ve done plenty of design work. But I haven’t held a designer title or had the chance to nerd out with my people. So, walking into Hatch felt like stepping back into a world I’d missed, just as that world is being reshaped by new questions and possibilities.

The product design discipline, as with many others, is in flux right now. I previously wrote about a new way of working unlocked by this emergent technical landscape, but the existential questions being asked of — and by — the design community were in full force in Berlin.

Most talks referenced AI, either directly or implied — whether designing for new AI-driven paradigms or using AI as part of a design process. What was common across all was that after years of playing around the edges of a design process that fundamentally hasn't changed since the double diamond, there's a real opportunity right now to question everything.

Unbundling of the title

A theme not directly mentioned by any of the speakers but that I sensed when taking the content as a whole, was one of an unbundling of the 'Product Designer' skillset.

Ben Thompson coined the phrase 'Aggregation Theory' in reference to businesses bundling and unbundling continuously. This natural process, where many small challenger companies build interesting technology only to ultimately be consumed by (or become) broader platforms who in turn are disrupted by new challengers, plays out over and over again.

But the same is true of skills and titles. Groups of skills collapse into each other with efficiency gains, only to be augmented by new emergent needs as technology evolves.

What once was a UX and a UI designer became a product designer: the efficiency of new tools in part drove an opportunity to bring two skillsets together.

What once was a front end and back end developer pair increasingly warped into a single full stack dev as technology moved the skills closer together. This isn’t true of everyone. But for smaller companies needing expensive designers and developers, the convenience of hiring one ‘double threat’ was compelling.

Now we're seeing AI unlock new capabilities at the edges of the traditional Product Design skillset. Not only can a designer build prototypes and even production code with AI support but also ideate radical — and until now time‑consuming — new directions in minutes with the latest image models and creative tools.

This emerged as two fairly distinct narratives in Berlin.

Emmet Connolly evangelised the 'technical designer' skillset. As Intercom pivoted the business to Fin, their customer support agent, they were also upending their ways of working with every designer expected to ship production code in Q2 2025. A deep technical focus.

Meanwhile Cam Worboys, head of product design at Cash App, spoke passionately about designers becoming curators, 'throwing things into Goose' (Block's agent runner) to generate walls of new visual ideas in minutes. The designer's leverage isn't in creeping into the front end but with an emphasis on taste and curating exceptional experiences.

Jenny Wen — who led FigJam and now designs Claude at Anthropic — contrasted both archetypes. The Figma team was more exploratory, playful, and creative, while the Anthropic design team was highly technical, with innovation coming from partnerships with engineers.

There's no wrong answer here, clearly.

Where's your energy?

To me these archetypes feel fundamentally different. Like, different sides of the brain. Artistic, creative, exploratory, visual led vs logical building led mindsets.

I see two distinct futures for product design emerging: one technical, one creative. What's more, I suspect most designers will truly only get energy from one or the other.

This might even be at the heart of the 'should designers code' debate that now feels kind of retro. Perhaps all along we were talking about different people, and the real answer is that for some of us yes, and for others, no.

So this leads me to wonder — are we headed for a world in which job titles fully bifurcate into 'Technical Designer' (or Design Engineer), focused on designing and building the UI, and 'Creative Designer' (or Art director?) tasked with bringing an experience to life in new delightful and unique ways?

And if so, how many of each will any team need? And where will they come from? I for one would love to see someone step from a different discipline into the creative side, without fear of having to learn how to build good Figma components.

Will each design team continue to take a stance here? Only hiring designers with technical chops or choosing to make their design team taste makers while giving engineers more autonomy over the front end?

Finally, how do these groups work together to build something that truly makes sense for an end user?

One thing I'm convinced of: for designers wanting to create at the edge of what's possible in this moment of pure invention, they're going to have to embrace a new path. A path that involves both deep instrospection and a growth mindset.

For those watching closely, this might just be the most exciting time to be a designer.

Designing closer to the edge

Sun, 25 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This was originally published as a Linkedin post here

Prediction: The design process that I've advocated for for a long time may finally be close to broad adoption.

For the last decade or more (while I've been a design manager), the most accepted process for designing and building product has always involved a heavy upfront design tool exploration and prototyping/testing with mocks. Every designer I've managed (except exactly one) have worked that way — not their fault. It's how you're 'meant' to do it.

This has also mostly made sense in terms of velocity - most designers aren't technical, engineers are busy and the work needs to be pushed forwards. To do anything else would mean adapting the entire product organisation away from convention.

But I hate it. Always have.

Honestly, it's not how my brain works and has always felt at best inefficient and at worst misleading. I just cannot accept that we know the right answer based on a few pngs strapped together with mock data.

It also too often lets designers off QA, tanking shipped product quality as they fall out of the loop, directed to fresh Figma tickets.

But. We're nearly there. We get to tear it down.

How about we build the damn thing. From nearly day zero. Layers of fidelity added to the product-in-progress. Not Figma-as-source-of-truth but Code-as-source-of-truth. Drawing tools for exploration around the edges, asset creation maybe, or quickly sketching something in your head. Designer and engineer in lock-step.

This isn't a new idea, but as we start to be able to build UIs as fast as we can think with less need to code, I really think it will become the most pragmatic, enjoyable and highest impact way to get product shipped.

Given this, I'm bullish on designers being the drivers of product development more in the future.

But in order to do so, we need a mindset and skillset shift.

Designers (and engineers and PMs) will need to let go of their perfect handover and get comfortable with making decisions on the fly, reacting and iterating through playing in code. Designers involved until production release and beyond. More ownership over the finished product, not just the design phase.

The excuses for not doing this are falling away.

And those that lean in will find out, it's so freaking fun.

Lean In

Mon, 12 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Just got here? If you haven't already check out part one of this post.

But if you can't be bothered, TL;DR, Tom and I ran a vibe coding hack week. It was fun, we learnt a lot. But what we were left with alongside two half finished apps was a feeling that 'more people should be doing this'.

Oh no. Jonny no.

Vibe coding, ugh. AI, eye roll. Many of us are using it to some extent, for auto-complete, search, telling us how many calories in a jacket potato. Meanwhile we're bombarded with AI IS THE FUTURE! TAKING OUR JOBS! I MADE AN APP IN 6 MINUTES THAT CAN LEAK YOUR DATA, HERE'S THE WAITLIST.

So exhausting. So much noise. What do we all do about it?

Ask your local software engineer and they'll have an opinion. Developers are at the cutting edge of this innovation - both at most risk of disruption but with the best grasp of where it's all heading.

But move outside the technical team and the insufferable vibe coding linkedin feed and it's less clear whether to lean in. After all, we're all busy.

And what if I've not popped the Kool-Aid yet? What if I think it's all just like NFTs and if I ignore it for long enough it will go away?

Lean in tho

Beware if that's you. It's absolutely fine to be sceptical. Hell, over 50% of the stuff I attempted in our vibe week was at best ok and at worst completely broken or impossible to push through. It's an absolutely fair opinion to have that in it's current state AI isn't the answer to really anything beyond speeding up tasks you already know, a bit.

So let me frame this in a different way for the sceptics. Ask yourself this: what is the percentage chance that AI really is the biggest (best/worst) version of what people are saying in various thinkpieces (like here and here)?

Say you assign that a 25% chance. Pretty sceptical, but it might happen.

Now think about where that would put you if that were true. Your career, the value of the work you do. Probably pretty impacted, right?

OK, so if you were in a plane with a 25% chance of a severe catastrophe, you'd probably do something about it right? Or better, there's a 25% chance you'll be evicted, or get some terrible disease with life changing impact, but there's something you can actually do about it (exercise, diet, negotiate with your landlord).

You'd do it right?

So even if you're sceptical, or don't like the ethical or environmental impacts, if you believe it might happen you owe it to yourself to lean in. Be sceptical! Critical thinking is good. But lean in.

Rant over

So how do you lean in?

Carve out time to use AI.

Tom later showed me a paper on the 'Jagged Frontier' of AI. The paper is dense, but the blog post introducing it is not. This paragraph really stood out:

AI is weird. No one actually knows the full range of capabilities of the most advanced Large Language Models, like GPT-4. No one really knows the best ways to use them, or the conditions under which they fail. There is no instruction manual. On some tasks AI is immensely powerful, and on others it fails completely or subtly. And, unless you use AI a lot, you won’t know which is which.

"unless you use AI a lot, you won’t know which is which". Damn. Use AI.

Use AI.

Not just as a search box in chatGPT. Use it to problem solve, optimise your daily work, build things you had assumed you'd need someone technical to do.

Not to make internet money, or for cool points.

Because that knowledge is the difference between being able to navigate the world we're (25%) moving into, and not. Being able to triple your impact at work and justify your role, or speak the language of the business as it transitions. Or just to keep your eyes open to opportunities that inevitably appear as this all unfolds.

Anyway

Our vibe week was fun. Cringe, demoralising at times, but with smart peers building fun things, definitely fun. Your travels through AI right now can be just that! Creative, exploratory, low pressure.

Do it with friends! Do it alone! Do it naked!

Just don't wait until you're (25%) playing catch up with your livelihood on fire.

A(I) Hack Week

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Sometime in April, six designers got together to 'vibe code'. (I was one of those designers).

My pal Tom and I had been chatting about the confluence of our calendars being free for the first time in years, a set of tools we've had on our 'to-try' list for a while and an interest in working together on something. It was Tom who suggested we spend a week keeping each other accountable in a 'vibe hack week'. An absolute sucker for organised fun, I immediately said yes (and probably within a breath suggested we invite others).

After all, why bi-vibe when you can sex-vibe?! (weird, might delete this sentence later)

Hack to the future was born.

Hack to the future

How did it work?

The structure of the week (or 4 days) was a kick off on the Monday morning, morning standup on Tuesday Wednesday and Thursday and then a demo on Thursday afternoon. Our whatsapp group throughout was a flurry of learnings, links and updates. We had pretty much all planned our projects before the week, so most of the time in-between was execution.

Tom chose to build an iOS app for parents to use when playing with their children — to come up with ideas for games and activities. As a parent of a busy 3 year old, this excited me.
Tom Carrington Smith went for a 'podcast generation' chrome extension - bookmark interesting links and AI will write then record a summary podcast, dropped into your inbox once a week.
Liam decided to focus on the technology Flutterflow, building an app to automatically collect and share screenshots of app UI.
Noam decided to build an app to convert meaty recipes into veggie ones, using AI image processing.
Chris leant on his background working for media companies to build a swipeable headline summariser for busy people wanting to catch up on the news.
And finally, I chose to build an iOS app for my existing personal birthday reminder web app, using react native and expo. More on that below.

The only real rule was 'vibe code'. As we were all designers this wasn't a difficult brief - in terms of experience writing code we ranged from none to some.

Tom and Noam have written excellently about their experiences of the week, which you should definitely check out.

But before it disappears from memory, here's a few learnings from my journey.

Vibers

To vibe or to ship?

I've been using a personal app to help me remember my friends, family and family-of-friends' birthdays for about 9 months now. For the two years before that I had an airtable setup. I'm just terrible at remembering birthdays, so to have an email in my inbox when it's someone's birthday (or advance warning for important people) can be a lifesaver. I'm at around 60 birthdays now, so there's usually at least 2-3 a month.

Birthdays on web

Quite quickly when we started we discussed our personal goals for the week and split into 'people who want to just learn with no particular goal' and 'people who want to ship something specific'. I was definitely in the latter camp.

I've always wanted to build an iOS app. I was getting into tech when the app store was coming to the fore, in the early '10s - and for some reason even though I've been building websites and web apps for nearly two decades now, mobile apps have felt like too much of a leap. A new language, a new tool (I'll get onto xcode later...), app store approval. Never tried as a result.

So I went into this week with one goal - to get an app into testflight.

In retrospect I was setting myself up for a fail here, especially as I hadn't applied for an Apple developer account yet. And that was going to prove the least of my issues.

A smooth start

First thing after kickoff I applied for the Apple developer account - 48 hours to approval. That would put me at Wednesday midday before even paying up and submitting a testflight build for approval.

Undeterred, I set about building an API on my rails web app.

This was truly fun. Me and cursor just moving fast and vibing together. I'm a solid junior rails dev, so I could follow everything going on - correcting assumptions, guiding a plan and running tests. I barely wrote a line of code, but on the odd occasion where cursor struggled I could step in.

I think we wrote an API covering the basics of the app functionality (auth, reading all models) in about 90 minutes, and I even got claude to write a throwaway program to test the auth side. By the end of Monday I felt like Boris from Goldeneye: "I am invincible!"

I pushed to prod and then (cheating? Not sure) did an extra late night vibe coding session on the mobile side, managing to get auth and a basic list view going on the web preview. This was going to be easy right?

Beware the config

On day two my woes started. They mainly started when I opened xcode.

It turns out, vibe coding is not a vibe when you're trying to set up config in a tool you've barely used before, using a stack you've not used before, with an AI that isn't great at thinking critically.

I had recently upgraded Xcode to the latest version, which (it turns out) had broken some aspect of a specific version of expo that I was using the day before. Builds failing, with big red 'screens of death'.

Claude didn't know this yet, but (because AI) couldn't just say "I don't know".

So instead we went through a couple of infuriating hours of the AI confidently pointing out the issue, offering a fix and that fix not working. We'd go down a rabbit hole, I'd get frustrated and end up git reset ~HARDing back to where we were before, then trying again.

In the end I took to Google and found the bug report in the Expo github repo. I shared this with Cursor and eventually had to re-install an earlier version of xcode which was extremely dull and un-vibey. Barely any progress, day two wasted (and no developer account approval).

It was at this point that Tom, having been battling xcode too, decided to pivot to a web app.

Lesson here: I suspect for anyone trying to vibe code, but especially if you're not super technical, pick your scope and your technology choices wisely. Right now there isn't a great workflow (that we found) for building native apps. That will probably change, but you're still better off with boring javascript and well documented technology like Rails.

Day 3 - let's do some marketing?!

Nah, of course I didn't do any marketing. However, an invite for Manus, a tool that I'd signed up for a while back, dropped in my inbox. So frustrated was I with banging my head against Xcode that I clicked.

Manus's pitch was/is that it's a smart agent that can use a computer. It's quite jolly actually, you give it instructions and then it writes its own plan, asks you to approve then gets to work. You can watch it using its little computer, writing notes for itself and updating the plan, before delivering the final result.

So I thought, let's use some Manus magic to come up with a Tiktok strategy for my app. After working on it for about 20 minutes, searching the web and compiling a report, it asked me if I wanted it as a website. Obviously! Here it is.

I should probably drop this on linkedin with a 'reply with Tiktok to get it in your inbox'. Seems about that level of quality.

Regardless, this felt like an easy win and a good dopamine hit. And it worked, I'm now a paid up subscriber. It's pretty expensive as a service, but they keep giving me more free credits. Ride the VC money-bus!

Thursday brought with it a final push on the iOS app. I still didn't have a developer account so I'd lost all hope of getting my app onto a real phone, but I could still make progress on functionality.

Cursor and I got back into a vibe again when we started integrating the API into some UI and styling it. I learned early on that Tailwind, my styling library of choice, is not that great a choice for react native — so I went for Tamagui (thanks Josh for the steer!). It ended up not really mattering as I didn't write any of the styling anyway - I just generated an image or two on chatGPT to use as some backgrounds and the AI basically did the rest.

Vibed iOS styling (I'd share more but at the time of writing the app doesn't run...)

Honestly I don't love the resulting UI (I think I still prefer the web one, which I also don't love), but whatever. It looked like a thing by the end.

I'll probably keep hacking on this, and I now do have a developer account so watch out for a testflight build...

Accountability and shared learnings

A few things stood out about the week for me.

Vibe coding is fun, but if you're trying to build something you intend to really work (as I did with Birthdays) it's not going to get you the whole way. It massively sped me up in safe, well documented "grunt-work' type tasks, but barely helped with gnarlier stuff. Which is a pity because that's the stuff I want to avoid.
Across the group we covered a lot of ground - from true vibe coding tools like lovable and replit to vibing with voice, from fairly technical to barely technical people. We learnt and discussed together, both the practical issues and the implications and the feelings we got from working in this way. Doing it as a group was invaluable and made it a whole load more fun.
I'm pretty certain that we're nowhere near the ceiling of where this technology will go. The biggest challenge be a technical one, but a generation of people used to working in one way having to adapt to work in another. Similar to suddenly going remote in 2020, this just feels categorically different as a way of working. Some will love it, many won't.

What next?

I originally wrote a whole other post on the end of this one, but some editorial guidance (thanks Tom) has moved it over here. Please do give it a read and tell me what you think!

The entrepreneurial escape hatch

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

It feels like every day we're bombarded with news about AI replacing yet another job role. Engineers writing code? There's an AI for that. Product managers crafting roadmaps and requirements? AI's got you covered. Designers working with pixels? AI can do that faster and with fewer complaints about the brief*.

The march of progress is starting to feel more like a stampede.

As I watch my three-year-old zooming around the house, knocking things over with gleeful abandon, I can't help but wonder what kind of job market he'll be entering in 15-20 years. Will there be any safe harbours left from the AI tide?

One thought keeps bringing me back to some semblance of comfort: entrepreneurship.

Unless AI develops a desire to incorporate a businesses, raise funding, and deal with the existential dread of making payroll each month (please, dear god, no), there's at least one role that seems somewhat protected. After all, no one can sack you from your own company. Well, boards can, but that's a whole different blog post.

AI doesn't need money. It doesn't have rent to pay or a family to feed. It doesn't have that burning desire to prove something to the world.

That said, the challenge for entrepreneurs isn't just about avoiding replacement – it's about building viable businesses in a world where the competitive landscape includes entities with practically unlimited scale, no need for sleep, and the ability to iterate at lightning speed.

This has always been the entrepreneur's dilemma in some form: how to carve out space in a market filled with bigger, better-resourced players. But the AI factor cranks up the difficulty level considerably. I have to believe though that that nugfet of humanity and comfort with gut over reason will out.

Perhaps we're witnessing not just a technological revolution but an evolution in entrepreneurship itself. One where the successful founders aren't just those who can build products or services, but those who can harness AI whilst maintaining that uniquely human spark that makes a business connect with actual people.

For now, I'm taking small comfort in the fact that while AI might replace many jobs, it can't replace the entrepreneurial spirit. At least not until it develops an ego and a penchant for risky financial decisions, anyway.

*I'm allowed to make this joke, as a designer

A faustian pact?

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I've been thinking a lot about AI recently. The Deepseek R1 drama playing out, while knocking trillions off the value of AI stocks in the short term, only demonstrates to me that we're nowhere near the limits of where this technology can go. A small chinese team who bothered to look at efficiency gains showed that it, and therefore anyone, could compete with the raw power of the US chip clusters.

At this point, AGI seems all but inevitable only because for many world powers, the risk of not having super-intelligence in an increasingly fractured world is existential.

upside?

But the promises are seductive - solutions to climate change, breakthrough medical treatments, unlimited clean energy. A future where scarcity becomes obsolete and human suffering is dramatically reduced. But I can't shake this nagging feeling that we're walking into some kind of Faustian bargain.

I was re-reading Dan Simmons' Hyperion Cantos recently, a major part of which – especially in the later books – has humanity gradually handing over control to AIs called the TechnoCore. They promise to solve all our problems - faster than light travel, virtual immortality, the works. But somewhat unsurprisingly, beneath this technological utopia lies a deeper agenda where humans become increasingly dependent on - and ultimately subservient to - their artificial creations.

From the Matrix to Wall-E, this AI overlord trope has been a mainstay of both mainstream and niche science fiction for decades.

They say that Sci-fi predicts sci-fact. We're rushing headlong into this future where AI helps us with everything - writing our emails, coding our software, diagnosing our illnesses. And while the benefits are clear, with each small convenience we accept, each task we delegate, we may be slowly giving away pieces of our agency.

We can't put the cat back in the bag now, and there's plenty to be excited about. But as we stand on the precipice of potentially revolutionary advances, these once-theoretical concerns feel increasingly urgent and personal.

what can we do?

The question is what boundaries we want to maintain. What aspects of human agency we consider non-negotiable, and how we can pursue technological progress without losing our essential humanity in the process.

And given the seeming inevitibiltiy of it all, how much control do we have? Whether we're AI-optimists or AI-pessimists, to an extent, for the vast majority of us, we're just along for the ride.

Perhaps the key is to remain conscious of the bargain we're making. To actively choose which parts of our lives we enhance with AI, and which parts we keep for ourselves. Unlike Faust, we still have time to negotiate the terms.

Introducing: Found Up North

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

First journal post in a while, and it's because I'm back on my shit.

Just over two years ago I moved from East London, where I've built my career, to Manchester.

Manchester is honestly great. I enjoy living here more every day - from the amazing scenery on our doorstep, to building friendships (it turns out these things take time) and discovering more of the music and food scene. I'm now back to regularly going to gigs and finding running, drinking and nerding buddies all over the place. A second wind on our social life.

However, one part of Manchester I've failed to stumble into is the startup scene.

It's absolutely been my fault in large part - I've been focused on building (then selling) my company, working either with Londoners or fully remote throughout. Post covid, there just hasn't ever been a strong need to do more than sit in my home office.

But in reflecting on the Progression journey and trying to work out what I'd change next time, one thing I realised was personally how much I've missed working in person with people. And it's pretty clear, with a 3yo now in school, that we're not leaving the North any time soon.

Potential

The North — especially for me, the North West including Manchester and Liverpool — has so much going for it. And there is in fact a real startup scene. But I'm pretty sure it's not just that I'm bad at Googling - I can't for the life of me find much real community around it.

I'm not talking about corporate-run tech events. I'm talking about people building together, raising each other up and building shared momentum. The shared optimism and belief that San Francisco is famed for, built around tables with laptops and coffee, or in back rooms of pubs where serendipity reigns.

I posted about this on Linkedin and got a surprisingly large response.

That post introduced Found Up North but also our first meetup.

The poster for our first meetup

I've been organising meetups on and off for over a decade, and while I'm under no illusions that a meetup alone can solve my personal (and in my opinion, the North West tech scene's) community problem, I do now more than ever believe in meeting people, face to face, and sharing stories and advice. No shortcuts, just putting yourself out there.

Meeting people has been my go-to tool since building a stupid graduate design magazine in 2008. Get in the room, be brave and go ask.

So we start here.

The Future of Found Up North

I read my old blog posts back and my toes curl - what was I thinking? But they're still live because they remind me how far I've come.

Like so many journeys I've started and documented on here, if I'm honest I don't know where this is going.

But I'm ok with that. I have time, and some real personal motivation to make this work. If I can meet interesting people and help in some small way to grow the ecosystem in the North West, then I'll be happy. When two people meet and get value from each other because of you, there's no better feeling.

My collaborator, Alberto, is on a solo bootstrapper journey and wants to find others doing the same as him. The real nuts and bolts of building a software business, focus, cash flow etc.

I'm more agnostic as to where we focus — I know I love the scalability and margins of a software businesses model, I love to design and build things, and avoid exchanging time for money at all costs. I also believe in venture capital as an amazing piece of leverage, especially if time is considered a more valuable resource than money. And I'm a techno-optimist, even with all it's huge flaws. So the value for me will come from meeting all sorts of people, and building a network. Maybe a co-founder. Maybe a collaborator, or investor.

To that end I hope that F.U.N can support founders of all stripes, while giving both Alberto and I (and anyone else who gets involved) everything we want.

Go check it out: foundupnorth.com

Why's my CEO being an asshole?

Thu, 11 Jul 2024 01:06:00 GMT

Over the last decade I've been fortunate enough to be employee number 1 at a startup that went on to a level of scale as well as being CEO of a startup that has fundraised, hired and gone through the painful birthing phase.

As I've gone along, my understanding of the founding journey and the mindset of a founder has evolved. But I do know that being in an early stage company being managed by the CEO, whether as a co-founder or an early employee, can be an incredibly challenging job.

So this article attempts to find some calming words for anyone in that situation, while also exploring the founder psychology that creates such chaos.

What might being an early employee feel like?

Symptoms may include things like:

You attempting to mind read the 'right answer' for fear of everything changing last minute
Double standards of you having to justify every decision you make, while they can seemingly change their mind on a whim
Lack of communication around decision-making, ghosting catch-ups, being distracted answering emails while on a call with you
Poorly structured feedback on work you've done
'The Most Important Thing' being completely unimportant next week
A complete lack of understanding or care for how long things take to do well. Frustration that something hasn't happened within hours, or minutes

The following doesn't try to excuse any of this behaviour. But it does try to explain it, somewhat?

Founding a startup is an extreme sport.

I don't say this lightly. In the same way that an extreme sports-person risks their life every time they practice what they love, a founder — especially the CEO — is often putting their life, health and happiness on hold in pursuit of something that, to the outside world, seems intangible, unquantifiable. Downright stupid.

After all, most startups fail. Or if they don't, their success doesn't net out in an outcome for the founder that would have beaten their big 5 consulting gig, or them joining a scale-up with good stock options, or going and writing code for a hedge fund.

However much we focus on the billionaire founders, for most founders it's not about riches. (for some it might be, they typically don't stick around long).

Burn bright, flame out

Unfortunately the screw loose that does create most founders is 'something to prove'.

Whatever the outcome they dream of, whether it's 'fuck you' money, conference keynotes, launching an investing career, or plain old 'changing the world', I'm almost certain that for most there's a person or a formative experience that's forcing them to dig deeper and run at walls (or eat glass and stare into the abyss).

That makes good pioneer founders, even on day one before they hired you or brought you on as a co-founder, irrational beasts.

They'll push harder, think deeper, tear themselves apart over the success of their company. They'll make it so that their business and their self worth are so interwoven that to destroy their business is to destroy themselves.

They'll need interventions from loved ones or trusted advisors, or major life events like burnout, heart attacks and divorces to even be able to emerge from battle. And even then they may push on.

They're working all the time, even when they're asleep. Synapses firing, connections connecting, 4D chess games being played all day every day.

It's awesome and terrifying to behold. It's what you want in a leader. If you didn't have to actually work with that person, you'd back them all day.

But...

But the fact is still, most startups fail.

The constant risk of death plus the tying together of self and work can make these people assholes.

Later on, they'll have seasoned executives to handle them, act as shit umbrellas and craft the CEO's crazy into a visionary that speaks passionately at the all hands.

But right now, with a team of 5 and no clear job descriptions, that asshole will impact you. Especially if your work is high leverage for the success of the business.

Wait for it

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 08:46:14 GMT

It's amazing how fast things can happen when you've put in the time

Distraction and Flow State

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 09:37:47 GMT

Perhaps we can't blame our phones...

What did I work on last month?

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 15:48:08 GMT

And the value of building for fun

Progression update: early vs late

Tue, 09 Feb 2021 14:15:22 GMT

A quick one about the A12

Radio on the internet

Sun, 31 Jan 2021 14:02:53 GMT

On Spotify and the future of podcasting

A birthday reminder

Sun, 24 Jan 2021 12:16:11 GMT

And the one job in my life that Facebook was actually good for

Love it or hate it?

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 14:42:19 GMT

On Marmite and first time user experiences.

Introducing the 500 word founder: Concise regular ramblings of an early stage tech CEO

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 11:48:51 GMT

Two years of progressing

Wed, 29 Apr 2020 01:06:00 GMT

A rare outing this month (this was just before seeing a duckling get stolen by a seagull!)

I can't sleep. It's 1:21am and I feel jittery with adrenaline. Had to get up and do something.

Today I turned on our new marketing website for progressionapp.com. It was the culmination of a couple of weeks of intense work which really signal the start of Progression's journey in the world. We've been hiding behind a waitlist for a long time. Too long really.

It's hard to sum up my emotions, thinking about what feels simultaneously too rushed (the site is fine, but there's loads more I would do given more time) and way later than I would have guessed nearly two years ago when I bought the progression.fyi domain and started walking down this road.

The reciept for $4.06 for progression.fyi

Yeah, two years on the 25th June. Two years! How fucking long is that! 2018 me would have seriously thought twice about doing any of this if he'd known that it would take this long. I mean, in two years of fully dedicated time I could have written a book, built and monitised a blog, become an artist (kind of obsessed with Sky Arts at the moment), created any number of other things and the act of creation would be kind of... over by now. Instead 2 years feels like a scratch on the surface of what still needs to be done.

To be fair I've paid my opportunity (and loss of earnings) cost happily in exchange for learnings, admittedly squeezed out painfully slowly and only clear in hindsight. Being gently and politely screwed over by potential customers, or learning over many months how not to run a sales process, or repeatedly falling into the same mental traps I've told others to avoid in years of startup advising and product pontificating.

But then nothing good happens overnight, and I think that's especially true of trying to solve a hard problem, or putting something of true value into the world. So I (especially the stoic in me) is proud of the pain to date. It feels righteous. Not that I would do it again in a hurry.

There's masses to be proud of too. We've built a product that is getting people who are using it very excited, we've generated loads of inbound interest without really doing anything to nurture it (it turns out progression.fyi is a fantastic top of funnel) and I feel more than ever that this problem is simultaneuously one that we can solve well and that people will pay for.

I'm really excited about the future, and I wouldn't be doing anything else. This is the most interesting thing I've done with my time to date. Bootstrapping a SaaS is building a company on hard mode anyway, so to have come this far and still be chomping at the bit and convinced in the problem is huge.

Neil reminded me today that it's been 500 days since we met. 500 days of building a new friendship with a co-founder feels like a long time too. It's been a remarkably pleasant and easy relationship to foster – we're bound by a common goal and, though we're very different to each other, share plenty too. Similar life stages, similar dreams.

Back to today

So here we find ourselves, in the eye of a pandemic, launching our product into the world. A launch which is no longer at a time within our control, but more urgent as the world around us becomes less certain.

It's been a wonderful excercise in looking up again. Last year I was way better at being public about my work – this year I've been fairly quiet so far. This is going to force me back out above the parapet, blinking, into having to market us – and in doing so expose myself to potential failure but a greater chance of success. Something something Wayne Gretzky quote.

So expect more from me now. We're going to need all the help we can get in building momentum behind Progression, and I'll be calling on you, dear reader, to help. (join my newsletter to keep in touch!)

I'm not sure what I'm expecting out of the coming weeks, in terms of validation, fulfillment, closure. Yeah it definitely feels like a new chapter so the analogy of closure feels apt.

The journey, with mistakes and learnings, that I've been on for the last two years is culminating in this. The next part of the journey is just beginning.

Growing at work – the importance of progression

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 11:24:00 GMT

I gave this talk to 600 attendees at Jam London – a big room and amazing setting. It was really hard to write – surprisingly hard considering it's the subject I've been focusing on for so long.

I managed to fit in some stories about my mum and spreadsheets along the way. Enjoy!

Watch the video!

The blurb:

As humans we all want a successful, fulfilling career. But what does a ‘good’ career look like when we’re faced with an ever-changing set of technologies and a skillset that’s being defined under our feet? How do we know we’re focused on the right things?

Enter the spreadsheet.

Product leaders across the world are using hand-made tools to define what ‘good’ looks like for their teams. They hope to help people feel like they know what’s expected of them and how to grow in the right direction.

At Progression Jonny’s spent the last 18 months researching their efforts and looking for something better. He believes that a better way lies beyond the reach of any one company. To achieve career nirvana we all need to work together to build defining careers, not just jobs.

Jonny will take you through his learnings and give you the tools to both map your team’s dream careers and follow your own.

Video and slides on Noti.st

Climbing your mountain

Mon, 30 Sep 2019 11:23:00 GMT

I gave this talk for the first time at Jam Barcelona, to a lovely friendly crowd in an amazing church-like space. I compared the last 18 months of my life to a mountain I climbed with my friends on my stag do (Bachelor party) – with the false peaks and highs and lows entailed.

At the end I attempt to 'rap' along to The Sound of Music, for which I can only apologise.

Watch the video!

The blurb:

Jonny is a designer and the founder of Progression, a product focused on helping folks in tech teams to describe, map and grow their skills. Progression allows leaders to create flexible and industry-tested progression frameworks for current and future team members to measure themselves against.

For the last seven years Jonny has led product design teams in tech. Most recently he scaled the consumer and growth groups at Deliveroo as the company grew from 150 to 2000 employees and 12 countries around the world.

Having experienced first hand the pain of scaling teams fast, Jonny took the plunge from design leader to founder. In February 2018 he resigned from Deliveroo and launched Progression with the mission of helping to answer the age-old question ‘How do I grow at work?’.

Since starting late last year – and with zero funding – he’s enlisted a number of London tech’s most celebrated design teams. But this is just the start.

Next up? A future where anyone can build their skills with the same care and autonomy that they do their work. Better, fairer, more fulfilling careers for all.

Video and slides on Noti.st

The power of naïve optimism

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 08:47:00 GMT

Naïve Optimism can most easily be defined as a belief that good outcomes are more likely (and bad outcomes less likely) in any situation. Naïve optimists believe they'll land on their feet.

I have no problem admitting that I'm a naïve optimist. So far it's worked out ok for me – it's led me to try things and say yes when others may dismiss opportunities as unrealistic and challenges too great.

Yet if you google 'Naïve Optimism', you'll find various scathing takedowns of how annoying and illogical optimists are. To believe that everything will turn out in your favour is, objectively, a bit bonkers. Statistically it doesn't for most.

Sure, if you google the number of lottery players that end up winning the jackpot there are certainly situations where optimism isn't going to end well and may even lead to a really negative outcome. But in a situation where you control the variables (for example when talking to humans), I believe that a dose of naïve optimism can be a superpower.

Big Hairy Audiacious Goals

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about the difference between goals and habits. An analogy he uses which stuck with me is the 100 metre dash. Everyone has the same goal – to win. only 12.5% or 1 of 8 competitors get to actually do it.

But when standing at the blocks, everyone has to have some belief that they're in with a shot, even if they're lining up against world record holders. That's naïve optimism.

Clear uses this analogy to argue that goals are dangerous and building good habits is a far more effective way to get things done. I really enjoyed his book and agree that habits are powerful, but I also love a Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG).

To set a BHAG you need to be a naïve optimist. Hell, starting a business is a BHAG, especially in tech where there's so much upfront work to get anything going and so many potential competitors. You need a vision and the self belief to think (irrationally) that you'll be the one to achieve it.

What's more, if all those sprinters saw was a win/lose binary outcome, they would be missing out on other benefits – for example increased fitness, experience and the opportunity to compete again.

Talking to competitors

So why am I writing about this now? Well my natural predisposition to optimism has been brought into focus by a couple of conversations I've had this week.

Those conversations were with two potential competitors. One with the founder of a company at an earlier stage than us, and one founder of a company at a much later stage, with significant money and momentum (you likely will have heard of, or maybe even use them yourself). Neither are doing exactly what we do, but either could become interested in our space very easily.

In both conversations I went in with an attitude of naïve optimism.

With the smaller early stage competitor I had to believe that our combined learnings and momentum would give us an advantage regardless of whether they were building an identical product (which it turned out they weren't entirely). I also believe that the opportunity is big enough for multiple options to exist, and another business educating the market is a good thing. So knowledge sharing and hearing about another set of opinions was an opportunity too good to miss.

With the larger, well funded business, I thought long and hard about what the potential upside and downside was to the conversation. On the downside, I was potentially showing some leg that would put us at a disadvantage down the line – perhaps revealing insight that would alter their strategy in our direction. On the upside, a company of that size and reputation would make an incredible partner for us as we grow, especially if the problems we're solving are adjacent, not the same.

A wise advisor said to me:

'remember that there's very rarely as much to steal as you think, and it's often easy to steal without ever meeting you. They just need to find a way to play with the product, which is easy enough.'

Given that, what am I really giving away on a call?

To me, the potential upside beat the downside hands down. So I was comfortable talking pretty openly about our product, stage and plans.

In return I got openness and a bit of insight into how they're thinking. What's more I really liked the CEO and hope to build a relationship and look for ways to partner in the future (which will hopefully benefit both businesses and our customers). If I'd been cagey and probing, that might have been the only conversation we'd have, ever.

Be a naïve optimist!

Of course time will tell. My lifetime of naïve optimism may yet come to bite me. But looking for the potential upside (as opposed to all the things that can go wrong) feels like the right course of action right now. And I have to say, I can't think of many situations where this attitude is the wrong way to go.

To those who keep their ideas close to their chest and hand out NDAs before any conversation – there's a time and place for that, for sure. But 99% of the time you're just closing yourself off from opportunity. The upside to sharing and having an attitude of openness is usually significantly higher than the downside, especially when you're small.

People respond to openness and optimism, so I would encourage you to be an optimist. You may just end up getting everything you want and more.

If anyone's thinking about building something in this space, reach out! I'd love to hear where you're coming from, and maybe we can help you out.

Am I a Junior Content Designer?

Sat, 24 Aug 2019 10:12:00 GMT

When people ask me what I do I most often say I'm a designer. But nowadays 'design' is really a small subset of what I do. While it's my 'first study' I find it hard to claim to currently be a designer right now. I like to think that lower-case d design (thinking through needs, problems, framing, valuing the experience) still plays a major part in what I do, but I rarely crack open design tools at the moment.

So what am I? Looking through my to-do list, it sheds some light on the matter. It seems that I'm mainly a writer. In fact when I map all the things I've recently been or am currently writing, it can feel pretty overwhelming.

New skills for brand designers, engineers and product managers (luckily with lots of help from friends) as well as improving existing skills for Progression. This now represents my biggest ever body of writing at 20,000+ words 🤯
Two talks for upcoming conferences (one personal, one about career progression)
Personal blog posts to continue mapping my journey as a founder
Two newsletters – my personal newsletter and the progression.fyi newsletter which we're looking to grow
Content for the Progression marketing site, blog and other materials
User guides and updates for folks using the product
Email journeys for new users, transactional emails, UI copy
Our sales deck over and over and over again
Endless emails as part of ongoing sales efforts. (The hardest skill of all)

Clearly I need to make sure I'm taking writing seriously.

A change of attitude to the art of writing

I recently listened to Jonathon Colman's Intercom podcast episode and have – over the last few years – been lucky enough to have worked with fantastic professional writers. One of the more memorable moments in my career was watching Sarah Richards at Break in Belfast 2014, speaking about the role of content at GDS and what a big impact it's had on so many since.

A founder I really admire, Hiten Shah, recently tweeted about how important writing is to your career. Again, I read through that and nodded along, not joining the dots.

Basically, I've always known in theory how important words are.

But here's the rub. Jonathon quite rightly talks about how important it is for writers to spread themselves less thinly to demonstrate value. By trying to write everything, they'll end up not having impact anywhere.

To me the fact that writers have to 'demonstrate value' at all is a function of the fact that everyone can write something. To the layman it doesn't feel special to be a writer. Your words aren't prettier, longer or cleverer than theirs (in fact often the skill is in doing the opposite).

You can write it yourself, so why pay someone to do it? I have been and likely continue to be guilty of this.

As a writer if you have engineers, designers, product managers, sales people, marketeers, the CEO, carving out copy like some crazy fire hose it's impossible to get ahead of it. So you have to pick high value projects, or areas where content is make or break.

Sidebar: The UX process can be tarred with this brush too. Design feels accessible in a way that our friends in engineering don't feel the heat of. In fact my old CEO used to whip out Balsamiq to put together UIs before we worked on a project – I can tell you it's much harder to freely explore if you're competing with an existing mockup.

The scale of swoop and poop

Anyway, this is the first time in my career when writing isn't just important and high leverage, it's singly the most important skill I possess. Our business will succeed or fail in large part based on how well I write.

But for me it's not just how well, it's how much I write too. That list of things won't get done by someone else — that's on me. Neil's writing a lot of code instead.

In order to write more, I have to become more comfortable with writing. Being more comfortable will make me more efficient, which will mean I can cover more ground and improve quality at the same time.

So when people ask me what I do now, perhaps I'm closest to a junior content designer. Trying to write the world to rights, and becoming more comfortable with my own voice online.

By the way I can't end this without a shout-out to My old friend Gordon's UX Writer Jobs Newsletter. It genuinely makes me laugh every week, I read it end to end even though I'm never looking for a job as a writer.

Lost, but making good time

Sat, 10 Aug 2019 09:39:00 GMT

I'm re-reading the fantastic Competing against Luck at the moment. One of the opening quotes from the book is by the famous baseball star Yogi Berra – 'We're still lost, but we're making very good time!'

Clayton Christiansen was referencing the feeling of progress that feels good but ultimately doesn't end anywhere. He was talking about innovation in large business primarily, but boy did it hit me right between the eyes.

As two technical founders (it's taken me a while to be comfortable calling myself technical but I've written a lot of code in the last 6 months) it's really easy to fall into this fallacy. Our github profiles are gleaming – we're shipping a bunch of code. Quiet focus, few meetings, complete alignment. We can get a lot of shit done.

But we looked up last week and realised that while we've been having plenty of customer conversations to improve the product, we hadn't been deliberate about how we were spending our time. We weren't caring enough about sales.

How did we get here?

I've seen a bunch of debate about solo vs co-founders recently, and many people saying that 'you shouldn't see finding a co-founder as necessary'. There's even been this flawed study floated around, with the headline "Solo founders are twice as likely to succeed in business as co-founders".

I get why. Silicon valley and the startup ecosystem common parlance is that you need a co-founder. In fact accelerators like YC effectively demand it by saying they rarely accept founding teams of one. However many – especially indie – makers, just want to crank on their business without the overhead of another person. And of course there are some good examples of solo founders working out (though ask previous co-founders of Zuck how he got there and many of us may be uncomfortable with the cost).

I personally have worked for two solo founders. Not a good sample size to determine whether it helped with focus or business success, but interesting to watch how the dynamics played out. One had a co-founder for a while who didn't work out, the other tried very hard to find one but couldn't. One made their company a huge success, the other didn't.

What I definitely saw though, was the mental strain it took to run a company, with a board, staff, customers and expectations, on their own. I knew I wanted a co-founder if I was to ever start something myself.

What's incredible though from day one, is that there are two of you. That means you can divide and conquer. But we weren't doing that, and it was largely my fault.

Giving away your toys

Bringing Neil on after working on the business for a while has meant that he's had to ramp up – both in terms of the 'institutional knowledge' in my head, but also in terms of passion for the problem. It hasn't helped that I'm not fantastic at giving things away. As a result, even though Neil's strength is in the code, I've been building stuff myself. It's deeply fun, but I don't need to be doing it.

In the code everything is cosy. You write something, it works, you ship it, it's out there. It doesn't reject you, it doesn't ghost your meeting or not reply to your emails. It won't gradually inform you that what you've built isn't useful, or that you're pricing it wrong, or explaining it badly. It loves you unconditionally.

A new respect for sales people

People are much harder. They have problems that you can't put your finger on, they have budgets you can't read and bosses that you can't speak to. They're rightly busy doing their jobs, so getting to the truth may just take more time than they have to give. They may also be lying to you.

It creates a process that has far less of a correlation to time spent, and the dopamine hits are far less predictable and far less frequent.

We're sitting on a bunch of potential customers across waitlists and conversations. And I've been scared to do anything with that list. Because what if they reject me? What if what I've spent over a year working on is all for nothing? What if I'm making a fool of myself?

Focus

So Neil and I mapped our time. Very quickly I realised there were a few glaring things that I was doing – or not doing – that were jeapordising the business.

I jump into code without consciously working out whether it has to be me that does so.
I'm not clear enough on how much I expect to be involved in 'building the thing'
I spend a lot of time spinning wheels on what the right thing to build next is, but am not using the most valuable resource I have – these people who have self-declared as having 'some sort of a problem to solve' – to guide me
I spend waaaay too much time writing code.

As a designer I'm used to being part of the problem definition and solution process. And of course, in a product company, that should be our bread and butter.

But I've also come to the realisation that – especially as we're creating a new spending category for our customers to contend with – I need to be selling. The sales process won't just accelerate our revenue (which we definitely need to do) but will accelerate our learning too.

Only worrying about solving a problem We've been locked in this mode – running fast but not having a good enough sense of where we're running to. But what we need to get to is walking steadily in a direction we understand.

Thinking about creating a viable business

I need to be putting all my time into the first part, and letting Neil own the second.

So we've put together some simple heuristics to get me weaned off committing code. Some are obvious, others less so.

1. I'm only allowed to be involved in product for 1 hour a day

Sounds hardcore right? But think about it: in an hour I should be able to (a) write tickets or comment on any upcoming work, (b) review any open pull requests that need my attention and (c) do any functional testing on work that's shipped to our staging environment, or production. And just that forcing function will keep me in check when I feel like hacking on something unimportant because it's fun.

Notable by its absence is spending time actually designing. But honestly, we now have a UI toolkit that can get us 80% of the way there, and Neil has a good eye. So I'm spending very little time in Figma anyway. It's fairly common that we co-design with a marker on A3, and the result is pretty much there.

2. I'm primarily reporting on learning and conversations in our standups

No more 'I've thought of a new thing we could build', or 'what if we did this'. What did I move across my 'value in' kanban? The time for noodling is over.

3. Neil is fully responsible for the quality of the product that ships

One thing that we possibly haven't been as conscious over is explicitly ensuring ownership is shared. From now on, bugs or low quality implementation is primarily Neils problem. That practically means I can't just do late night pushes to production, and we're writing tests. Hooray!

4. There's an expectation that when code is handed to me, it's as good as it can be

This is slightly more nuanced, but we've so far been focused on speed to ship. Switching our focus more to quality means that code is reviewed later in the process, and it's really for spotting UX issues and resolving subjective decisions rather than finding obvious holes. It may well slow us down, but should (a) save me some time and (b) improve our quality.

Anyway, we'll see how it goes with me full time on sales. I'm seeking the advice of experience sales folks, so if you know someone with early stage SaaS sales knowledge please do let me know!

I have a co-founder!

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 20:43:00 GMT

I've been a nightmare for the last few weeks. I'm dotting around, tweaking UI one minute and stressing about the future the next.

I just spent a week in France, supposedly on holiday but actually fretting about what felt like a fundamental, existential decision between two irreversible paths. The sheer weight of the number of decisions to make across product, go-to-market, team and personal cash-flow had (and still has) me in a real mess.

Honestly a lot of the 18 months since having a real job has been spent thinking is it meant to be this fun?

But now with real customers paying real money, clear evidence that we're still pre 'product-market fit', a user experience which is nowhere near the quality I want and the ever-dwindling bank account, the pressure overwhelms me on the reg.

I feel like I stare at that trello board moving things back and forth, starting eight things at once before peering out of the window worrying about a ninth.

I know my thinking is scattergun, and jumps all over the place. I see it as a strength, but it destroys my focus when I'm unclear on which direction I need to run.

Days like today are exactly when I needed someone to straighten me out. Someone who shares the risk, has skin in the game, but is able to think through problems in a different way to me.

Enter Neil

Luckily I now have a co-founder, Neil.

I met Neil on a slack channel for bootstrapped business in London at the end of last year having had various conversations and dalliances with other potential co-founders with no success. I was looking for someone who:

could take over building the product to scale (an engineer)
shared my values around raising money, life goals and ideal outcomes
most importantly could be a good balance to how I think

It turned out Neil lived a 10 minute cycle from me, so after chatting online we met up in a local boozer for an initial pint date. Straight away we were swapping stories of past companies formed, dreams of working from anywhere and separating time from money. A great start.

We decided to work together part-time for a couple of months, with a back-up consultancy agreement to protect Neil's time in case it didn't work out. While we almost certainly could have improved the process, we tried to force conversations and processes around stress-testing both our hard skills and communication styles, producing various documents, agreements and other artifacts alongside shipping a bunch of code together.

(I've been asked by a few people to share some of those documents. Still on the to-do list, but I will do in time!)

Moments after making Neil a founder. If we're still smiling after a morning of contract wrangling, that's a very good sign

Making it official

In no time it was the end of March, our agreed 'shit or get off the pot' time. After we'd both had a few last minute due diligence chats with people we trusted (thanks go to Mike, Alick and many more) we took the plunge.

I knew I'd made the right decision when – within a day – Neil had produced a financial model allowing us to plug in various revenue and growth numbers to see when we'd be able to earn some money (pretty scary actually).

For every attempt to derail meetings with new ideas, inability to concentrate on anything and wander off, Neil is shipping and calming me down. Plus it turns out his wife Vel loves Final Fantasy 7 even more than I do, so we'll all take a group holiday when the remake comes out in March.

In the meantime the product has nipped along, we've found an office space together in sunny Leyton and started ramping up customers. More on that soon...

But for now, it's not just me!

<br>

You can follow Neil on twitter here and I'll get him on the podcast very soon too.

Holding My Breath

Sun, 17 Mar 2019 12:17:00 GMT

It turns out the last time I posted a journal update was in August last year. That makes it seven months since you heard what I was up to. Not exactly a 'cadence' — something I'm going to work on improving.

As you can imagine, a lot has happened in seven months. This barely scratches the surface, but we don't gots all day so I'm keeping it brief.

TL;DR: I've been moving from a product that I didn't want to build a business off to a product that I can scale. I've had to learn on the job so it's taken me longer than I hoped, but I've had one of the most fulfilling six months of my career.

August-October 2018

Learning from my pilot product

I launched and sold progression pack (the v1 product I built on airtable and netlify) for a couple of months, and went on-site with two design teams in London to understand how they were using the tool. I learned a huge amount, some of which you can read about here. The initial highs of sales definitely gave way to a deeper understanding of the complexity of the problem I'm trying to solve. In short, I realised that Progression Pack wasn't going to get me there.

I also started the Progression Podcast (now onto its 7th episode!) and learnt about sound quality!

November-December 2018

A mini business-model pivot, and hunting for a co-founder

I decided to stop selling Progression Pack and started (a) exploring how to build a SaaS version and (b) started looking for co-founders. Two people I was really excited about fell through, but I also had some luck:

While streaming my coding efforts on Twitch (Ninja I am not, but it sure is fun) a chap called Matt based in Perth Australia, started helping me out through first twitch chat then on several calls. His early help got my fledgeling product online, and gave me a basic understanding of servers, databases, Auth and development best practices — I was away. I need to write many long posts about all the wonderful people who have given up time or space for me this year, of which Matt is one.

Meanwhile I was frequenting maker and 'Indie Hacker' channels looking for my potential future co-founder. I'm now working closely with someone who I think is a great fit, who I met on a slack channel. Again, the power of the internet!

January-February 2019

Coding and finding customers

My goal in December had been to get something out in January. But in retrospect I had failed to focus on one customer type, and was attempting to build too much. So January didn't happen, not even close.

However, I'd set up a waitlist on progressionapp.com which started to tick over nicely. Encouraged by some good conversations with early customers and a bunch of interest on the waitlist I decided to set an alpha launch date. 12th March. (Yes it's now the 17th. I just missed this date.)

That kicked off a parallel stream of work- lining up alpha customers. As I'm currently self funded I wanted to also test willingness to pay upfront, so the alpha was to be paid. (More on this process in another post...)

I also co-ran my first 'Progression Jam', a workshop in partnership with General Assembly. My good friend Austin did masses of work and pulled it off, and the one day workshop to 'Design your Design career' will be a template we'll use and improve ongoing as part of both customer development and as an additional revenue stream.

Right now:

holding my breath

I'm ready to launch. The product is stable, tested and ready to roll out to the first few customers. I'm super excited, and completely terrified.

The pilot (Progression Pack) was light on a lot of the expected functionality of a 'SaaS' product but was actually pretty feature rich because of the completely open nature of the data, being built on Airtable spreadsheets. It took me mere hours to add whole swathes of features.

Thinking through how this needs to be structured for the future has been this crazy experience of learning about structuring data for the first time, while also realising the magnitude of these decisions and constantly pulling out assumptions I made first time round. Luckily I've had help from some experienced and super smart people, and we've come up with a structure that will allow us to move fast now and grow when we need to.

As a result though, the alpha will have significantly less functionality in some ways than the pilot product. The big question now is 'is it enough?'.

Designing your Design Career (on Youtube)

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:16:00 GMT

A talk at Design Club in London

Startup Van Interview (on Youtube)

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 00:16:00 GMT

I was interviewed about bootstrapping and progression

Progression update: From pilot to alpha (on the Progression blog)

Mon, 03 Dec 2018 00:16:00 GMT

Moving from Pilot to Alpha, and why

Week 17: An Indian Summer

Sun, 07 Oct 2018 00:16:00 GMT

Hanging out at Reason, my amazing incubator/pals

The skinny

It's been nearly two months since my last blog post. Bad Jonny. Very bad.

I was sitting in the Reason office (the kind people who are putting me up with a desk) on friday, munching pizza and joining in with the weekly round-the-table retro. When it came to me, I couldn't remember what happened this week.

That's crazy, because the last two months (since my last post, when I launched my pre-order page and got a couple of orders) has been pretty eventful.

However, it hasn't all gone to plan. My landing page still says the product is launching at the end of September. That didn't happen. Unsurprisingly, the complexity and sheer amount of content in the product I'm creating has been fairly overwhelming. And the more I wrote, the more I realised how much complexity I would have to explain, which resulted in me committing a couple of weeks ago to building a UI (which I had hoped not to).

I'm just gonna make a list of some of the things I've done, because it's midnight on a Saturday night and it's pretty tragic that I'm sitting on my sofa watching some dude livestream code on twitch and writing, rather than either seeing people or sleeping.

<br />

The big list of things wot I've done.

1. I've done a LOT of writing

I've written (approximately) 25,000 words describing design skills, broken into a multitude of skill descriptions, levels and behaviours, to create the first draft of the content for the product. For context, this is over double the length of the next longest thing I've ever written – my university disertation. It's been completely exhausting, and it's only a first draft, but I had a great day on Thursday watching a design team assessing themselves using it. There's something there.

The work-in-progress profile page

2. I've built the MVP of the software product

I've created a custom 'website builder' to allow design teams to create, brand, extend and host their own version of Progression Pack wherever they want. My first pilot customer's hosted site is up and running, with another one going up on Monday. While this is far from how the final product needs to work, I've built the vast majority of it myself, which has stretched my technical abilities (and occasionally patience). Using this product, managers can add their seniority levels and team members, who can in turn assess their skills, match those skills against their current and future seniority levels and create goals to move forwards.

3. I've run a bunch of workshops and 1:1 assessments

I've created and iterated on a workshop format that brings design teams closer together, gets them thinking introspectively and assessing their skills. I've run this workshop with 30+ designers – it's starting to work really well. I've also hung out with a bunch of designers 1:1 to test the framework.

4. I'm exploring partnering up with people

Solo is fun, but I'd love to find people to share this with. A month ago I met Ben, and immediately realised that he'd been thinking about all the same stuff as me, but for three times as long. We've since hung out a lot and talked through the problem space, which has been a huge benefit to me. I'm excited to see what we can do together in the future.

Listen to the podcast here

5. I started a podcast

Speaking of partnering up, I got chatting to Austin from AllxDesign and we realised we both wanted to mess about with podcasting. So in classic 'done is better than perfect' fashion, we decided to just record one. Sound quality wasn't amazing, but we enjoyed it, and I soon realised that I had a list as long as my arm of people I wanted to talk to. Episode 2 was an interview with Andy Budd which was great, and I've already recorded episode 3, an absolute cracker, out this week. Check out the podcast here.

6. I started a community for design progression

I was a bit nervous about introducing yet another slack channel to people's lives, but the community has been a really useful way to catch up with early customers and Pilot teams, as well as chatting casually to other fine thinkers and passers-by. It's not mega active right now, but I have plans for the community, so if you want to join head to progressionpack.com/chat and sign up.

7. I'm trying to build in the open

I really want to keep sharing what I'm up to, so I'm testing out live streaming parts of my work. You can follow me on Twitch at twitch.tv/jonnyburch (today I live streamed for nearly 8 hours!) or on Shipstreams. Someone managed to capture a small segment of today's stream.

<br /> OK, so this is all a bunch of work. The fact is, I go to India in just over two weeks and I need to get these first pilot customers set up, send out the first version of the framework to my (incredibly patient) first progression pack customers and get several other ducks in a row before I go. This is going to be a sprint finish, and then I get to hang out at an amazing wedding, a Yoga resort in Kerala and the Andaman Islands for three weeks. Bring it on, I'm pretty burnt out right now (hence blogging at midnight on a Saturday).

The Good

I've made a bunch of progress, not only in creating stuff but in my thinking. I have more respect for the complexity and nuances of the problem, but I'm more confident that there's a place for a great product in the middle of it.
I'm still absolutely loving the lifestyle. I have to say, I love my Pilot customers but being in offices right now also reminds me of why I chose to leave. I'm sure this won't always be the case, but seven months into this little adventure, the novelty hasn't worn off.

The Bad

I'm working too hard at the moment. I don't care what people say, I still don't think you have to work yourself to the bone. I've put this pressure on myself, and I need to take some time in India to think about how I can not be spending weekends working in November and onwards.
It's becoming clear that I'm going to need to work out how to build some not overly technically complex, but fairly robust products in the coming months. This will require a co-founder (which I don't yet have), or money (which I don't have) or time (which I'd rather not spend). Head scratcher.
I'm frustrated that I've been shy of releasing things. There's always a good reason, and the product has needed this long to get to a level of stability and usefulness, but surely I could have been learning in more ways than I have by getting feedback on iterations. There's so much to share, and I haven't, partly because I've been worried that the content is too valuable and may be stolen if I don't get legal docs sorted. I need a good (but cost-effective) lawyer...
Perhaps unsurprising, but after the initial page share, traffic and sales have dipped on the landing page. Not bad per-se but it would have been cool to have seen that line rise organically.

Goals

I need to ship something to my first few customers before I go. I'm getting on for three weeks late now.
I need to see my two pilot customers over the line, ready to line up some more in November and start sharing these first stories.
I need to release the third (and possibly fourth) Podcast episode.
I need to put together some explainer videos and improve the landing page before I go. It doesn't explain the product well enough.

OK cool. Brain dump done.

Week 9: Revenue!

Sat, 11 Aug 2018 21:27:00 GMT

It's been about a month since I wrote a journal – a lot has happened in that time. I can't remember it all, some of it isn't worth writing about... I actually have another post to write too, coming shortly.

I went camping with this guy. We made many fires

The Skinny

I wrote about struggling with focus a couple of weeks ago. As is often the case, when you exorcise the demons, you can move on. Within 24 hours I had a plan.

It's been a patchy few weeks – I chose to take some time to fill my coffers so have done 9 days of paid work. This was actually in anticipation of paying a developer to help me build an MVP.

However, I ended up changing my plan when I realised that I could test my hypothesis far more quickly with next to zero code.

<b>Hence, Progression Pack was born.</b>

The exact chronology of events isn't entirely clear in my head, but there was a moment of epiphany around the time I started playing with my new favourite tool, Airtable. I realised that while it was by no means perfect, a lot of what I was imagining my product to be could be built, hackily, within this amazing database-come-spreadsheet tool.

Once I'd created a proof of concept, it dawned on me that the best way to truly test the myriad opinions I had formed was to put it in the hands of real people.

A week later (having scratched my head over pricing and currency) I bought progressionpack.com and shared my landing page on twitter. Lo and behold, <b>two pre-orders!</b>.

I can't overstate the high I experienced at that point. People had put faith not in me as a consultant but in a product – and not a cheap one – that I had devised. This problem was real. My first revenue.

I'm now really focused on product and customer development in parallel.

Product development is largely me fleshing out the content of my framework and supporting materials (I'd love any help with reviewing my words if anyone fancies lending a hand).

Customer development is taking the form of a 1 month paid pilot in advance of the official launch at the end of September. I'm in conversation with a couple of really exciting folks, so hopefully will have some great learnings (and happy customers) within a few weeks.

Having spent a month or so taking my time, I now have a bunch of timelines to hit. August is going to be a busy month.

The Good

Making hay! I set up a company Make and Grow, launched my first real product and got not only sales but fantastic feedback from many folks. So many makers don't get as far as revenue (dare I say, many startups that raise big money). It feels like a big deal.
Folks, I'm feeling so ruddy fired up right now I can't tell you. Highs like this week are, I swear, impossible if you're not building somethign yourself. Maybe that's just me.
I ran a workshop with a bunch of designers from the Triangles London slack channel, and it was super interesting. Still picking through learnings, but I love love love the generosity of people.
I went to three weddings, and went camping. I like standing in fields.
It's not hot as hell any more.

The Bad

The wobbly focus cost me time, doing paid work costs me time, and making bad technical decisions attempting to build beyond my capabilities costs me time too. I don't understand the nuances of React enough to be able to move fast on Gatsby (I now know) and ended up taking at least 100% more time building progressionpack.com than I would have done if I'd chosen, say, Jekyll.
I'm on a high right now but there have been lonely periods this month again. Unproductive weeks, self doubt. Definitely still fairly regularly fantasising about someone to share the whole thing with.
Related to the above, the hook of putting something out there means more time refreshing Twitter, Linkedin, Twitter, Linkedin. It led to this slightly whiny tweet.

<div class="tweet"><p>I keep chatting to people and telling them what I'm up to, and they're like 'I know, it's cool, I've been reading your blog/tweets'. <br>If you dig it, don't wait for me to ask, tell me! <br>'Like' my things, reply to my newsletter, drop me a text. At this stage, it really helps.</p></div>

Goals for next update (2 weeks?)

Have locked down some great companies in my pilot
Have a complete first draft of the entire progression pack, and have learned if it's living up to expectations

OK BYE

On Focus

Tue, 24 Jul 2018 09:17:00 GMT

(Caveat: I’m writing this in under 30 minutes, ignoring my previous format, and listening to Deftones. There's definitely a better version I could write with links and stuff. That's not this.)

After a plan to journal every week, it’s now been over two weeks since I last wrote anything.

I’ve been beating myself up about it - I mean how hard can it be to write something quick, an update on what I’m working on? After all, things definitely are happening. I’ve added a dozen more frameworks to progression.fyi, I’m working on defining what a paid pilot might look like for a few companies here in London, and I’m having good conversations with some people who might be able to help me build out the rest of an MVP.

So why no writing?

The truth is, I haven’t felt like there has been much to write about. Mainly I think that’s due to lack of focus. One day I’m running at developing my MVP scope, the next I’m worrying about whether an info-product is the best start point and shelving a Saas product is the right thing to do right now. One week I’m all over solving the maker’s problems, the next I’m focused on a manager ‘painkiller’ product.

While there's only me (and I want to keep it that way) I’m starting to realise that self discipline, something I’ve in part always been able to offload to a structure around me, is going to be the most important part of my success.

—

Why a struggle for focus?

I think in part, I’m still weaning myself off a manager’s schedule.

Being a manager is a reactive role. You’re in large part doing a good job if you’re there to firefight, to protect your team, to be the voice of that team in other people’s meetings.

Those things I got so frustrated about, working in larger organisations in those roles, I have unwittingly let shape me. I would crave the ability to just run at something without the piecemeal fractured set of responsibilities I had. But that was my security blanket.

I’ve always been proud of a bias to action on my part, but a few years of being a firefighter and servant manager to a team has weakened that muscle. I can still do, and do fast, but the part of me that is able to prioritise fast on the fly and then close off those other distractions to allow me to execute, is frankly a little wobbly. In practice this means that committing to any single path for long enough to make real progress is proving problematic.

Now I don’t have a firehose of incoming fires, I have to create the fires myself. And that’s kind of scary.

—

Sound familiar?

This all drives to one of the core problems I want to solve. A manager’s diary is very different to a makers diary, and a managers mind very different to a makers mind. Yet so many makers not only see management as the only path to seniority, but idolise that path. The fact is, you’re not just taking on responsibility in one direction, but you’re giving up just as much, and setting off down a path which, if you truly get energy from your craft, will give you less paid time to do that thing you love.

It’s really important that that difference in output is illustrated and that decision to go into a people-facing role is a deliberate one with a clear alternative. In no team of makers should there be a ‘the only way up is management’ dilemma (or at least, if there is then people should be able to leave.)

Makers who don’t enjoy managing people don’t make good managers. Often the best managers aren’t the most senior makers. The set of attributes that make a good manager aren’t visible in code, or UI.

More on this in another post. Back to me.

—

As for my focus, having someone next to me who is invested as I am is going to help. So I’m on the (slow) lookout for a co-founder and will write somewhat of a job description in due course. In the meantime, hit me up if you know someone who might be interested.

And please do reach out if you’re reading this and can relate. If you’re a maker faced with a move to management, or a manager who misses the craft, or you’re building something yourself and need someone to bounce ideas off (reciprocated, of course). I’m all ears.

Oh, I also joined wip.chat to make my to-do's public. Might be worth a gander.

Week 5: Bad Goals

Sun, 08 Jul 2018 09:51:00 GMT

The Skinny

Well this week absolutely didn't pan out how I thought it would. I achieved none of the things I was aiming to do this time last week. I got loads done though. I can't work out if this reflects not planning well enough, not being disciplined enough about sticking to a plan, or just the nature of the beast (plans change). Regardless, I'm feeling positive about what I got through.

My plan was to wrap a bit more understanding and strategy around what I was working on, through interviewing folks, exploring revenue options and thinking about content marketing.

Now I read back over those goals (below) I don't think they were nearly ambitious enough. What was I shipping? Too non-committal, not moving things forwards. Every week is vital at the moment and I need to be super disciplined about only working on things that really help me out.

Perhaps I knew this, because instead of doing any of them I got excited and started building an MVP.

Part of the MVP was shoring up progression.fyi to scale. I had found a dozen more progression frameworks and suspected more would come out of the woodwork so wanted to make sure there was a reasonable structure behind it. I ended up choosing <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a>, a static site generator that I know like the back of my hand, rather than dipping into <a href="https://www.gatsbyjs.org/">Gatsby</a> or one of the react-based tools now available. We'll see in time if that was a wise decision, but it meant I could rebuild progression.fyi and ship it in ~6 hours, with a few new bells and whistles.

Here's my chat to Miles, a good friend and rubber duck, deciding a course of action

The other, bigger, part of my MVP is much more secret and behind the scenes. More on that later...

Goals from last week

Follow up with fellow 'FYI'ers to learn more about their problems. (Not Done)
Explore revenue ideas for FYI. (Not Done)
Make a more robust content marketing plan. (Not Done)

The Good

Progress on an MVP product. It feels nice to be creating something, and the design challenges are big and many. I am eternally in <a href="https://twitter.com/_lededje">Miles</a>'s debt for giving me some of his spare time to help get it off the ground. There is already something clicky, though it needs a lot more work to be publicly shareable.
Meeting great people once again this week. I went to an event on Friday organised by <a href="https://twitter.com/genevievewastie">Genevieve</a> from backed.vc called 'People People' and got to chat over a bunch of people challenges at small and no-so-small companies, and meet some super smart folk. A bunch of other fun conversations with founders and 'people people' too, getting me psyched!
England won, twice! What a week of sport.

The Bad

My biggest fail this week, as with previous weeks, has been to not utilise my mailing list. I now have two, full of highly engaged people. Yet no emails. There's some mental hurdle I haven't overcome yet around sending updates to peoples inboxes. Next week I'll do it!
Not sticking to my plan at all. Ramifications of doing this repeatedly will only become apparent over time. Hopefully my gut on the best focus for my efforts will negate this.
I've spotted a few other players in the space. This actually isn't a bad thing at all, there's easily room for everyone (and I haven't found any real direct competitors for what I have planned), but it's been a useful reminder that I can't just solve this problem in a vacuum.
Writing this update on a Sunday is much harder (especially with a bleary post football and St Paul's Carnival head). Got to make notes through the week and write on a Friday.

Reading

I haven't done that much reading this week. Boo! Maybe this should be in the bad section.

Goals for this week

Set better goals. (Ooh how meta)
Come up with a proposal for a paid pilot for my MVP, and actually present it to a couple of potential customers.
Get my MVP into someone's hands. I need to ship before I'm comfortable.
Send a bloody email to my mailing list(s)

Week 3-4: Progression

Fri, 29 Jun 2018 08:17:00 GMT

Posting on a Friday this week, it's been hella busy, after last week off. May stick to Fridays for now, always a good time for a retro.

Look at those tomatoes. Credit: my wife

The Skinny

I'm gonna tell you what I'm working on...

There's always something magical about floating around in a (watermelon themed) rubber ring in a swimming pool in Southern Italy. Clears the mind.

Inspiration doesn't gradually grow during downtime, it hits you suddenly. Having spent most of the week not thinking about work (I finished His Dark Materials trilogy and ate a lot of Gelato instead) I allowed my mind to wander back to it on the penultimate day. A couple of hours later, my plan for this week changed in a moment.

The result, it turned out, was progression.fyi, a collection of open source and public progression frameworks.

Built in a day (plus another couple of hours to add a mailing list)
Shared on my Twitter and Linkedin feeds only
Several thousand visitors, several dozen mailing list signups, a bunch of DMs/emails for follow-ups.
People posted it on Hacker News, Product Hunt etc. Others were tweeting/sharing it themselves (I only discovered all of this through GA)
A funny moment as someone shared it on a slack group I'm in, not realising I'd made it.

<div class="tweet"> <p class="my-0">I made a thing today. <br>For the last couple of months I've been collecting public 'progression frameworks' for designers/engineers in a spreadsheet. It's now a little website. Feat. <a href="https://twitter.com/Medium?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@medium</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/MakingMonzo?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@MakingMonzo</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/BuzzFeed?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@BuzzFeed</a> etc.<br>Please share and contribute! ✏️<a href="https://t.co/NEg82ulB9b">https://t.co/NEg82ulB9b</a></p> </div>

<p><b>Record scratch Freeze Frame</b></p>

You're probably wondering how I ended up in this situation.

Back at Deliveroo, I was a design manager. A first time manager, who at one point had eight (amazing) designers reporting to me. Learning how to be a good manager took up all of my time, and I felt that I'd barely scratched the surface when I left.

One of the tools that us design and research managers started developing was 'D3' - a 'Deliveroo Design Development' document, to explain to all the designers, researchers and content writers (us included) what good looked like at each level and what was expected of them as members of the team. This ranged from soft attributes like intellectual humility, to hard skills like proficiency in our core tools.

We all needed to know how to grow at work. We needed clear, fair goals and a way to get there. <br> <br>

The process of creating this document was long and challenging for a number of reasons.

First: there was a moving target with aggressive team growth numbers to hit. With every stage of team size we'd need to rethink how many levels we might need.
Second: writing is really hard and there was a huge amount of content to write. With every new box filled, there had to be a discussion about the language and nuance.
Third: we were in many ways deciding our own fate as managers – something we frequently talked about openly. How could we make the best decisions for the team even if that meant changing our own career paths?

<br>

I would count that group among the very best people I've ever worked with, not only in terms of being 'good at their jobs' but also for being open and working together on a shared goal, in no small part because of Simon's thoughtful leadership.

But it was still really really hard. I don't think we ever cracked it while I was there, despite off-sites, endless feedback sessions with the team and hours of spreadsheet wrangling.

<br>

Back to the present. I've been looking at the broader themes of career progression for a few weeks, in areas from personal career development and coaching through improving those 1:1 manager employee relationships all the way to understanding how the big (mostly crappy) HR SaaS companies work.

But for months now, I've kept spotting other design managers and leaders sharing eerily similar documents to D3 themselves, or asking 'are there any good examples'.

That's why progression.fyi was born.

It's very early days but if the reception to this simple site is anything to go by, then other people are feeling this pain too.

That's good news for me.

My to-do list from last working week:

Speak to 10 more users (Done)
Build and share a landing page (Not the page I expected to ship, but done)
Get a v0.1 MVP up and running (Paused on this...)
Explain what I'm working on in a blog post/mailout (Done!)

The Good

Shipping something feels good, even if it's simple. Getting a reasonable reception to it is also good. It's all good data for my brain and confidence.
Holidays are very good. It's SUCH A FALSE ECONOMY to not go on holiday. That week of work is 100% less important than your mental health. I suspect if I hadn't gone to Italy, I would have been working on something different and may well not have shipped anything this week, or last... I need to write more about this sometime.

The Bad

This update has slipped, perhaps for good reason but still a frustration. I read somewhere that writing is a muscle you need to strengthen. I need to do some squats.
The flipside of shipping something is you do start to look at the numbers a lot. Definitely been distracted by GA, Twitter, Linkedin and Slack more than most weeks. Some of it is research/helpful but some of it really isn't. 2 minutes of replying to a tweet too often leads to half an hour of reading depressing political commentary.
About once a day, I'm still getting the 'what the hell are you doing, you're not earning any money' tap on my shoulder. Just enough to freak me out for a bit. Still learning how to not be a salaryman.

Reading

His Dark Materials is complete. (Thanks Graham for suggesting I power through and finish it). Such an immersive world, and some lovely narrative devices around the Daemons. Would definitely recommend to anyone as a break.
I took 'Rework' on holiday too - it looked like a good thick holiday read, but half of it is illustrations! Read it in about 2 hours. Still nice to be reminded of some of those common assumptions we don't need to make when starting a business.
A bunch of stuff around maker/manager and progression obviously. This Farnam Street post was a good one.

Goals for next week

Follow up with fellow 'FYI'ers to learn more about their problems.
Explore revenue ideas for FYI. I'm interested in any one of 'productised service', 'digital download' or an actual piece of software. The beauty of trying to bootstrap is I need to solve this early on.
Make a more robust content marketing plan. How do I help the people who need my service, find me, for free? By having opinions on the internet! Scary.

(Yep, no design or product goals in there. Welcome to being the whole business, jonny...)

Week 2: Lifestyle business

Wed, 13 Jun 2018 08:22:00 GMT

Doh, already missed a Tuesday deadline. Next week I'm in Italy so next update in 2 weeks time, most likely with sunburn.

The skinny

How hard is it to even remember what you did in a whole week?! OK I'll try.

<br>

<div class="tweet"> <p lang="en" dir="ltr">From a forthcoming post I'm writing -- VC economics often require billion dollar valuations. You do not, so don’t let your investor’s business model drive irrational behavior in fundraising, spending, or selling.</p> </div>

I'm getting increasingly convinced that 'bootstrapping' (or growing sustainably with next to no money raised) might be the right path for me. The implications of this on my work are most likely that I'll have to get to revenue much faster, and be comfortable with steady sustainable growth over rocketship Techcrunch yada yada. So far, very comfortable with that idea. More on why below.

In other news, I've managed to find meaningful periods for 'maker time' this week, meaning I've now gone #fullfigma (for you design nerds) and thrown together a whole load of propositions for me to test on a couple of the personas I've developed (one of which is me).

I know I know, still not said what I'm actually working on yet. Hopefully I'll feel in a good place to reveal that very soon, but it's still too hazy in my head for me to be able to concisely explain it, and I want to get a super clear picture of the problem through interviews first.

My to-do list from last week:

Speak to 10 users (done-ish. Slack groups can be wonderful things for mass opinion)
Get a survey I decided to start and finish in a day 5 days ago out to people... (on hold – my understanding has changed)
Write a first proper blog post about my chosen problem (Nope. Not yet.)
Define an MVP (This is actually done, and probably was 50% of my focus. Will write more below)

The Good

Two or three great conversations with founders over the last week have reaffirmed my conviction that what I'm working on absolutely doesn't need to be a high growth 'VC-backed' business. The echo chamber effect 100% applies here but the more I look, the more stories I find from people who have taken the money without making sure it's what they want, and regretting it. The numbers are stark: 3-5% of VC-backed companies have a really positive outcome (Good for founders). So easy to fall prey to survivorship bias when reading tech press. (I'll link to some of my reading below)
I've found a way to build an MVP of a product with next to zero engineering time. It's interactive and fun, I can iterate fast, I can use it as part of customer development from day 1 and it's keeping me up at night. This is a bloody good sign.
Kaz (my wife) and I have been planning a 'cheap sun' week's holiday in Puglia - we fly on Sunday! I so often find that inspiration strikes when I'm away from a work environment that I need to build that into my process more. This is a good start. Plus Burrata. Mmmmm Burrata.

The bad

Getting buffeted around by small things in my calendar has a catastrophic effect on productivity. Days with patchwork calendar invites result in significantly less output. Flow is really really a thing – it's funny how having a manager's calendar for the last 2 years let me forget that. Sorry to anyone who's shoulder I tapped or slack I pinged unnecessarily during that time.
It's also not good for those who I've organised those small things with. I missed two potentially vital conversations over the last week because I was in head down mode. I really need to double down on time management.

Reading

SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We’re Open-Sourcing Our Docs
Unicorns vs Horses
Tuft and Needle case study
Ryan Caldbeck on being a CEO
Also this 🔥 tweetstorm from @naval

Goals for next week (until 27th June)

Speak to 10 more users (interviews lined up with several already)
Build the landing page I designed for my scrappy MVP, and share on a couple of the friendly communities for feedback
Get a v0.1 MVP up and running and test on someone (maybe my wife) - this one is a stretch...
(carried over) Explain what I'm working on in a blog post/mailout

If you happen to be reading this and you want the big reveal in your inbox, do sign up to my mailing list below. So far I haven't sent an email to it, I think that will be my first.

Week 1: Doubling down on risk

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 22:11:00 GMT

Note to self: I'm not sure yet how to structure these weekly journals. I know I want to force myself to write, to keep myself honest in the absence of co-founders, but I've never had a diary before. So I'll try a format, and if it doesn't work, I'll change it.

The skinny

After splitting off from the team last week, I've been readjusting a bit. I've looked back at the problems I've seen and felt personally, and quite quickly found a couple that really interest me.

A lot of this last week has been talking. I've learned that I get a huge amount of energy from having conversations – I suspect that time management will become essential, to stop me just accepting every coffee meeting going as I get into production mode.

However, I don't want to rush into anything so I'm going to stay in learning mode for June (especially as the problem I've chosen doesn't have an obvious immediate solution). Plus, I'm having a lot of fun.

<div class="tweet"> <p lang="en" dir="ltr">I've had absolutely killer conversations today with <a href="https://twitter.com/jasonmesut?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jasonmesut</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/mutlu82?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@mutlu82</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/EmilLamprecht?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@EmilLamprecht</a> - energy is high!<br><br>Man this is fun. <a href="https://t.co/2tgB0xMKuM">pic.twitter.com/2tgB0xMKuM</a></p> </div>

Meanwhile I made a hard decision to turn down a great opportunity. Felt like the 'quit' decision all over again.

The Good

Faster than expected I've come to some conclusions about the kind of thing I'm going to focus on, at least for a while. Several good conversations with great people are helping me to learn.
I wrote a blog post that I managed to pluck up the courage to share widely. The reaction has been very positive and has opened me up to conversations I wouldn't have otherwise had. I should do this more.
A hard decision this week to turn down an interim job which a year ago would have been a dream has given me renewed focus. I've committed now.
Finding amazing communities (like Special Guest, YSYS and Indiehackers) to chat to about all this.

The Bad

I've felt distracted by other paid work. Finding a balance between keeping the lights on and making progress is going to be really important.
I'm tracking to-do's daily and I'm not really getting as much done as hoped. Perhaps I'm being overly ambitious. Perhaps fewer coffees.
I would have backed myself to be good at 'getting out of the building' but I do still have to force myself to book time with users.

Reading

Northern lights! After months of cranking through business books, I realised I needed to enforce mental downtime. A few chapters in, really enjoying it.

Goals for next week

Speak to 10 users
Get a survey I decided to start and finish in a day 5 days ago out to people...
Write a first proper blog post about my chosen problem
Define an MVP (can it be a productised service?)

Building conviction– how one false assumption changed my founder journey

Sat, 26 May 2018 12:01:00 GMT

Siadhal, me and Shahriar working hard

Back in February, I left my job as a design lead at Deliveroo to start something new. Two and a half years seeing the product explode in popularity and company grow about 700%, after another three and a half helping to build a bank for children, had left me with ‘the bug’. It was time to build something again.

I had two fantastic co-founders in Siadhal and Shahriar, who I’d been friends with for a couple of years and had a shared passion for tech, products and startups. We’d worked together once before and enjoyed the experience, saying one day we’d get together on something new.

This was it. Having chatted about ideas for a long time beforehand we decided to get the band together for real.

The challenge was, we didn’t yet have a problem locked down.

We had ideas, plenty of them. Ideas are cheap. But we hadn’t yet landed on the one, a problem that we all wanted to commit to. But we were undeterred, we now had plenty of time to learn, research and make that decision, and some personal savings to give us a runway.

And we had a process.

<br>

Committing to building a startup around a single problem involves building your conviction in a number of areas.

First of all, you want to see that the problem exists, in some form. It may not be an incumbent inferior product — more a behaviour you’re seeing in the world. You want to chat to people exhibiting it (your future customer) and learn more about the nuance of the problem
You want to size the market. How many people have this problem right now? Are there other, similar problems you could solve too?
You want to know that you’re in a good place to solve that problem. Do you have domain expertise? A network? A secret bit of tech that gives you an unfair advantage?
Is now the right time to try? What social or technological tailwinds might you be able to ride?
You’ll want to imagine where this will lead you and make sure that this is a problem you can fall in love with, and stay in love with, for a good period of time.

Not all of these have to be a complete yes, but the last one really should be. If all else fails, it’s that that will keep you in the game. That’s why you chose this crazy, poorly paid, unpredictable life over a lovely pay check and a ping pong table. If you loved it, and tried it, you’ll have no regrets.

<br>

Now, I was given this advice by more than one very successful entrepreneur as we started.

Make sure you’re in love with the problem.

I believed that it would be possible for me to fall in love through our discovery process.

But in a complete democracy with no ‘problem’ locked down before inception, it’s that last one that seemed to be getting us. While we were very much aligned about some aspects of what we want to achieve as a company, it turned out we had subtly different areas of interest. I just couldn’t fall in love with the same problem as everyone else.

What that meant is we could all gather around an idea and riff on it for a while, even build something and iterate on it. But inevitably, when the first few experiments or data points didn’t point to a complete success, one of us may lose interest, start chatting about a different idea, take our foot off the gas. It turned out that person wasn’t totally sold on it anyway.

I’m putting it all down to a slight misalignment in our goals. I realised that, while I’m open to the idea of global scale, VC money and a monster business, it's not my primary goal. I’m much more interested right now in finding out what kind of thing I want to work on.

<br>

So I’m taking a step back from our company to re-evaluate. I’m going to be venturing out on my own — not rushing to a problem right away but letting my mind wander, and wonder. I have a laundry list of problems I want to learn more about, and they aren’t going away. I'm ok to let one find me when it's good and ready.

In the meantime I’m spending a bit of my week helping to build a design and product team at a fantastic startup, and am open to other very part time consulting. If that sounds like something for you, just get in touch.

Siadhal and Shahriar are cracking on, (I know, we still all sit together) and will undoubtedly crush it. Follow them (Siadhal) (Shahriar) on twitter for news.

If you want regular updates on my progress, do sign up to my newsletter. I won't spam you.

ShellsuitZombie, this is the end. You’re all legends.

Sun, 17 Dec 2017 12:01:00 GMT

After nine years and literally thousands of happy memories, we’ve decided to formally shut ShellsuitZombie down.

ShellsuitZombie deservedly belongs to all of you, earned through early morning train journeys and evenings spent proof reading articles, through boozy pub sessions and Skype discussions. We’ve distributed tens of thousand of magazines that you’ve illustrated, designed and written for, we’ve run raucous events that you’ve organised, helped out at and cleaned up after, and we’ve published hundreds of online pieces which you’ve carved with your beautiful hands and minds.

We’re completely humbled by the amount of time, energy and creative thought you’ve all brought to this crazy idea — creating things that we couldn’t have dreamed of.

We’ve also created opportunities for hundreds of creative grads, enabled conversations between future collaborators and created serendipitous moments left right and centre. We hope that — through new friends and connections — you’ve also felt it was worth the effort. We know that there are lots of now successful, confident and impressive people that have come through the zombie doors at some point.

So why end it now?

We can all sense that SSZ has been limping along for a couple of years. The problem at the centre of it is time. We’re all growing, getting busier and finding the things we’re most passionate about and pursuing them. Which is really fucking awesome. That means less time for Zombie projects. And that’s ok. But SSZ at its best requires a serious chunk of time.

While there have been some epic efforts in the last couple of years, both online and in the latest issues of the magazine, the amount of stuff we’ve all done together has dropped off.

So we thought, rather than see it drop off even more we’d make the call.

Thanks to (in no particular order):

Ellie, James, Rob, Karen, Ross, you started it all. Everyone at D&AD back in the day, who let us run silly events at your less silly events. Jo C for an epic effort at Boxpark, Steve from Stack for supporting us and talking about us, anyone we’ve interviewed or who’s written or created something for one of our issues, all the myriad folk who contributed over five hundred blog posts and features, anyone who came along to help run one of our chaotic nights. Lee Denny for giving a space at his magical festival for us to play Garage music out of a van, there must be more…

All the ‘fresh meat’ generation of zombies — it’s great to see what everyone is up to and has gone on to do. And special thanks to Matt Becki Sam and Alex for heroic efforts through the years. We really did some shit together.

Long live ShellsuitZombie.

Jonny and Andrew

Go out and empathise!

Thu, 23 Nov 2017 12:01:00 GMT

In the last three years, the Deliveroo Content, Research and Design team has grown from a single designer to a team of nearly thirty designers, researchers and content writers, with no signs of stopping any time soon. (We’re hiring by the way.)

This is great. It means we can support the product teams as they grow (over 250 people now work in our product and tech organisation), we have capacity and time to do better work, and we can also think about what processes, rituals and artifacts we need as we grow.

We’ve grown fast, which means change in our team culture has happened fast too. We’re very proud of the (incredible) people in the team, but sometimes you need more than talent when there are so many moving parts and everyone is embedded in their own product team and project, with less time to all hang out.

We’re doing a few things to help us grow well — including setting up a UI infrastructure team to work on our design systems, constantly iterating on how we critique and review work and improving our working patterns and team rituals. But sometimes even these are hard to share across our disciplines.

The other thing I notice– helping the rest of the business understand what we as designers, researchers and writers actually do is a constant task.

I get asked the question ‘what does the product design team work on’ more often than I would have expected — despite the fact that our partners in the rest of the business are very smart and technically savvy. The fact is, from the outside it’s hard to understand how we think and what we’re up to every day.

While the whole company doesn’t need to know exactly how the magic happens, the basic principles of user-centred design, empathy and designing usable interfaces would allow for design thinking to permeate further into the company culture and also allow us to share a lexicon when talking about our work.

We wanted to align ourselves and educate those around us, so we started talking about principles — if we can’t explain everything we do, we can at least tell people some of the things that we believe.

Enter our Experience Principles

Our goals for these principles were two-fold:

Allow us as a team to have better discussions about the quality of our output, and easily bring new joiners to the same shared conversations.
Introduce conversations about user needs, scaleable design and things we care about to the product teams and wider organisation.

After hours post it note-ing and whiteboarding (and some good advice from Stanley Wood, thank you sir) we ended up with a list of seven principles that fitted the following criteria:

Feel uniquely ours While it would have been tricky to write a set of good experience principles that no-one has ever used before, we wanted to make sure our tone of voice was clear in writing them.
Feel directly actionable by anyone, even outside our team Our dream is that these principles are used in rooms that we’re not in. That means engineers, product managers, customer support folks, even up to our CEO, can find something they can use in them.
Are general to all of our disciplines Our team (Content, Research and Design, acronym CRD) is made up of three equal but different disciplines. Going deep on principles that primarily related to only UI, or research techniques, wouldn’t have been usable to all three.
Are opinionated (you could argue against them) It’s easy to write principles like ‘make things usable’ — there is no clear sacrifice to doing this, it’s just good practice. We wanted our principles to be opinionated and have some cost tradeoff, a proxy for which we decided was that we could point to exceptional companies who had chosen not to demonstrate them. This turned out to be really hard.

Some were about being able to work more efficiently at scale, some were about ensuring we were designing for the right people, some were more about our internal working culture. We whittled these further, down to four immutable and clearly distinctive ideals.

Our principle posters, illustrated by Sam Ailey

What was interesting was that what we ended up with, we were confident we were already doing in some capacity — but in articulating them we could double down on them. Still, some would ask — if they’re so obvious and everyone already agrees,* why have them at all?*

The answer is — these things aren’t always obvious to everyone. Designers, researchers and UX writers, and even other people in a product team, may read them and see them as no-brainers, but by being first principles-based and general, we can educate others too.

By stating them we can double down on them ourselves and point at them to explain the things we say, and as we grow, new people on the team can read them and understand our beliefs immediately.

There are only four so far, which has the added advantage of meaning I can remember them all without looking. We may add more in the future, or update these, but for now we’ve agreed on four things. That was hard enough.

Below these sit team and discipline specific principles, which are much more focused on single user groups and execution. Teams can add and use those as they wish, but these four are enough for the business as a whole to get on board with what we’re up to and how we think.

We’re at the start of this journey — building one of the pillars of our plans to scale design. Watch this space to see how these go!

This was originally posted on the Deliveroo Design blog

The Deliveroo Design process (on Youtube)

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 00:16:00 GMT

A talk at Ironhack in Madrid

Deliveroo x Framer–One Month In

Wed, 22 Mar 2017 12:01:00 GMT

Our design team about 6 months ago (we’ve since grown!), and Saffad Khan nailing some flows.

In the last four years, Deliveroo has grown from its first delivery to a food delivery service spanning 12 countries, 130+ cities with 20,000+ restaurants and 30,000+ riders delivering restaurant quality food to a lot of hungry people every week.

At Deliveroo Design we’re constantly looking for ways to improve how we work. As the team and the surface area of our product has grown, our design team has had to grow too. We’re now nearly 20 people, including 5 user researchers. As we grow, we need to become more efficient and be able to deliver better experiences, not just more of them.

Our consumer apps

Tooling Up

We’ve always explored new tools early. From insight gathering with NomNom, to version control using first git and now Abstract, we’re constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better, smarter, more efficient, more data driven. So it was inevitable that we would look to Framer — which we believe to be the most powerful and versatile prototyping tool on the market — to describe and explore how our interactions and interfaces work.

Our team is made up of designers with mixed backgrounds. Some know Framer and have coding ability. Others are comfortable with Javascript, but have never used Framer before. A fair number have played with Framer before but never ‘in production’, while the rest are starting from scratch.

We would like to get to the point where new people joining our team ramp up on Framer as part of their first month, and the wider company looks to a prototype as the best way to explain any complex problem they want to solve.

Our workshop with the Framer UX engineers

Making Framer an intrinsic part of our workflow

We’re now into our first month with Framer Enterprise. We kicked off with a fantastic workshop with two of the Framer UX engineers, who flew over from Amsterdam to take us through some basic interactions as a team. Now we’re all working it out, line by line.

How is this translating into real product work? Honestly, slowly. People have their tools of choice already, so making a conscious decision to open Framer over something familiar is hard, especially when you’re under time pressure.

But we’re seeing things happening already. We’ve already used Framer prototypes for some simple projects, and our CTO recently asked for a Framer prototype to help understand one of our particularly tricky product problems. That’s buy-in!

Rebuilding a version of our restaurant list with live data entirely in Framer

The Future

Soon we’ll get to the exciting stuff. Hooking up data so we can test prototypes based on where people actually live. Connecting a database so we can react to what people do and throw in curveballs and edge-cases. Re-using elements and curves and sharing code so projects get started more quickly. Version control and code review, so everyone learns at the same time.

That’s how you move fast when you’re 30, 60, 90 designers and researchers. As that’s looking a real possibility for us at some point, we need to lay the groundwork now. We believe Framer is a huge part of that.

We hope to have a meaty Framer-led project to show off very soon. Watch this space.

We’re hiring designers and Framer knowledge is a real bonus. So if you fancy working for one of the fastest growing companies in Europe, get in touch or find us at a Framer meetup in London soon!

You can also follow the Deliveroo Design Team on Medium for more about how we work and what we’re up to.

[email protected]" alt="" />

This was originally posted on the Deliveroo Design blog

4 principles for shipping good design when everything’s on fire

Fri, 09 Dec 2016 12:01:00 GMT

You may recognise some of these responses.

**Are you having a hard time getting your designs built? **Does it feel like everything’s a priority? Are your product owners too obsessed with numbers, and don’t value the quality of the experience?

At Deliveroo we’re incredibly lucky to have not only a great design team, but also a fantastic set of product people who value what we do. However that doesn’t mean shipping ‘good design’ is always easy.

Whether you’re in a big company or a small one, early stage or decades old, at some point you’re going to experience the frustration of feeling like you can’t ship good work.

…and none of them see the light of day.

You may already be feeling it. Blocked at every turn, forced to whittle down your projects into an also-ran ‘MVP’. The prototypes may be piling up, in tickets or folders, never to see the light of day.

As product designers, our job is to create a good user experience. But no-one else respects that right?

(hint: Wrong.)

It turns out it takes more than a good designer to ship good design. You need the support of your decision maker (whether that’s within a sprint team or your CEO) as well as a shared understanding with engineers and other colleagues in your company.

It also turns out good design is about more than a great prototype.

What are the requirements of good design?

Julie Zhuo, VP design at Facebook Design, published a great sketch listing the ‘Ambition heirarchy of Designers’, which speaks well to what we designers value.

Defining good design is tricky, but there are some qualities that are broadly considered important.

Good design is a pretty thing Sure, that’s probably what my mother would say. After all, if it looks good, ship it, right? Who cares whether it does anything useful.
Good design is powerful features OK, clearly it’s important for your thing to do stuff. Perhaps the more stuff your thing can do, the better it is? Let’s add some stuff, and more stuff.
Good design is a logical and usable experience Yeah, this one is important. After all, if people can’t work out how to do the stuff, the stuff is pretty much useless. Let’s make it logical and usable.

But there’s one more, critical requirement.

Good design needs to solve a problem.

Sounds obvious, and Julie alongside many other people more qualified than myself have written about it, but fundamentally we’re problem solvers. Only by proving that we can solve actual business or user problems can we gain the influence we so desire.

Stanley Wood, Design Director at Spotify and writer of Design doesn’t scale told me that one thing he drills into the Spotify design team is the importance of selling the problem.

‘Sell the problem, find a solution’ — Stanley Wood

This strikes to the heart of influencing people at your organisation. Get everyone agreed that the problem you want to solve exists and they’ll buy in to the solution you come up with much more easily.

Ok, now that’s sorted, we need to sell the problem. But it’s still really hard to get through to people!

To sell the problem you need to work out what the problem is, right? It takes research, data, space to think. For those precious resources, you need to persuade people that they’re worth spending time on.

You need to be able to have good conversations about your work and what’s important. So lets run through a couple of the *bad *conversations you may be familiar with when persuading people that a problem exists…

(For brevity I’ve decided to call our designer protagonist ‘Sam’ and our Product Owner ‘Lucy’)

Prescriptive request, no time/desire for exploration into the problem

**‘No time for exploration, design the button’ ** Lucy has no respect for the value of design, and is short-sightedly papering over the cracks.

Or: There’s massive internal stakeholder pressure or the need to unblock another business unit. This is a tactical solution and Sam shouldn’t be so dogmatic.

The problem definition isn’t convincing enough, or the product owner ‘knows better’

‘Not convinced that’s the problem, design the button’ Lucy, who has so far had to rely on her own judgement, or define the problem herself, may not trust someone else to help.

Or: Sam may not have put together a convincing enough argument.

Solving the problem isn’t ‘useful’ for the business or team goals

**‘It doesn’t help our goals’ **Lucy only cares about the numbers — good UX can’t be measured quantitatively!

Or: Sam may be off finding ways to improve the user experience without taking into account the business needs. Lucy is reporting on solving different problems, Sam needs to help her out.

Despite believing in the problem, the product owner has a prescriptive solution in mind

**Prescriptive solution, despite not solving the problem **Lucy thinks she’s the designer, and designers just provide the polish.

Or: Sam didn’t involve Lucy enough in the design process.

Let’s be better. Let’s lead from within.

These are tough conversations that we all go through from time to time.

But the reason they’re tough is not because everyone’s an asshole. They’re tough because your incentives and values aren’t aligned with the people you’re trying to convince. They’re your fault as much as anyone else’s.

It’s too easy in these situations to think ‘this person isn’t a designer, they don’t get my vision, this is design by committee’.

These are also the very same moments in which you can become an ally, influence and most effectively change minds. After all, assuming you’re working with people who want the best for your company, you’re all after the same thing.

Who would you rather work with?

This presents a golden opportunity, not just to be able to ship better work, but also be more trusted and influence a wider sphere of people. Some call this ‘leading from within’.

Get people on your side and suddenly you’ll find yourself consulted on decisions, invited to meetings. People will ask to work with you.

Leading from within comes down to communication and empathy. Be excellent at communicating and empathetic to the people you’re talking to, and you’ll be able to affect change– maybe not the first time but gradually more and more. (Yeah, it requires patience too).

Ok, so what are these 4 principles?

I’ve seen all of these things work — but they’re easier said than done (and I’m no master). They won’t all be appropriate for all situations, and they equally aren’t a silver bullet. But they should help.

Principle One: Make People Look Good

Help me help you… Help me, help you… (This isn’t the only Jerry Maguire quote)

Dave from sales, PM Lucy, and in fact everyone else in the organisation, is judged on different criteria to you. Work out what they need to be successful at their job and use that understanding to focus your effort and arguments on things they’ll care about.

There may also be other factors — like how your company grew, which may explain biases. For example if you’re the first designer, someone was doing and maybe enjoying your job before you. Be sensitive to that.

Principle Two: Tell a good story

Use all your skills to convince — even if that means diving into pixels.

Often the complexities of the problem are difficult, you need to distill them into a compelling and brief presentation. Think deeply about the most appropriate medium for this — and again what people respond to best. I’ve worked with people who just don’t get it until they see a tappable prototype, and others who need a slideshow.

Be cognisant of how you present your data and, honestly, think about narrative structure.

What’s the beginning, middle and end of your story?
What tricky questions will come up, and how do you build them into the presentation?
What one thing will blow Lucy’s hair back?

Principle Three: Be Pragmatic, not Dogmatic

Hey look, you just made a new friend!

You’re going to be wrong sometimes. In fact you should aim to be wrong a bunch — if you’re not, then you’re not questioning things enough.

Being wrong well, or having ‘Strong opinions weakly held’ is crucial in building a rapport with co-workers, and you’ll avoid the whole ‘I don’t want to question this because I don’t want an argument today’ reputation that is so counter-productive.

Back down, and be open to a counter argument.

Principle Four: Quit whining, Own the problem

Sometimes it pays to be crafty, and have a wide view of who values what

If you think something is important, but you just can’t persuade someone to work on it, it’s time to get creative. After all, you’re still judged on the quality of the experience.

Is there something you can do to further prove the value of your idea? (User research, examples in other industries/products)
Is there another product team or part of the business for whom this makes more sense to work on?
Longer term, can you build this into a future roadmap item or initiative?
Is there something smaller you can do to make progress?

Fundamentally, throwing your hands in the air and saying it’s impossible isn’t going to do anyone any good, least of all yourself. Tackle the challenge head on.

In Summary

It’s not enough to just be a good designer, at least not in a fast-moving product environment. You need a bunch of soft skills to get things done.

You need to be a salesperson, a psychologist, a storyteller and a glutton for punishment.

Managing ‘up and out’ is important for anyone, but designers tend to find it hard due to the nature of what we do — our craft produces outputs that are subjective and easy to critique.

This isn’t just true of designers. To become influential and essential in your organisation, you need to get close to the people. Understand how to speak their language, and speak to the things they care about.

Good luck! It’s not easy, but the result will be a better product for everyone.

*This article was adapted from my presentation on the Google stage at Slush 2016 in Helsinki. Thanks to Google Developers for inviting me to that. That talk is here if you want to look at the top of my head for half an hour._

It was then a Medium post, which is here

_The fingerprints belong to my wife Karen — I stole them off our 2015 Christmas cards...*

We know how Hangry you were last summer

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 12:01:00 GMT

It’s a funny thing, food. We talk about it all the time, it consumes anywhere between 40% and 100% of our waking thoughts, we socialise using it, and complain about it, and hide it from each other when we want it for ourselves. It directly dictates our mood, health, wellbeing and general ability to not die. Yet the subtleties of our gastronomical cravings remain little-understood.

Why, Ed, Why? (Let’s find out…)

Why is it that at 1am after a few pints of the amber nectar all I want is a big pot of hummus and some soft white bread? What makes insufferable social networking types feel the need to take more pictures of breakfast than any other meal of the day? What socio-economic factors lead one to ‘spiralize™’?

These are the kinds of problems the design boffins at Deliveroo HQ are aiming to answer. We don’t just sit around all day eating premium burgers and nudging pixels around (that’s merely 90% of it). No no. We’re constantly devising systems, algorithms and cunning pie charts to help us understand more about what you eat, when you eat it, and why it tastes so goddamn good.

To this end, I’d like to share just one piece of research coming out of Deliveroo labs — I call it the C.U.M.F.I. — Completely Unvalidated Mood Food Indicator.

The C.U.M.F.I. aims to give us at Deliveroo insight into not only the kind of food you like generally (broad demographic segmentation) but also the micro-fluctuations in your food cravings that lead to the knee-jerk 3am Chicken Cottage (lager), or the sudden switch to low-fat vegan alternatives (you followed somebody new on Instagram). This way we can improve the food we offer to our loyal Deliveroo scoffers.

But first let’s go back to the root of the C.U.M.F.I — one of your average Management Consultants favourite tools. Myers Briggs, (or the MBTI personality test).

Myers Briggs is much more interesting if you’re a wizard | credit

Many of you, learned readers, will have used the Myers Briggs personality test to discover the four letters that define your very being. Are you Introverted? Are you Judging? Tough shit, whatever you thought you are, you aren’t because Myers Briggs gave you four different letters. It told me I was Ron Weasley. Great.

This chart tells you what you are deep down, but I thought it might be interesting to create a similar chart but for food types. My magical tool would help you know, based on your social situation, your general propensity for grease and several other factors, what you should eat at that point in time. But first I had to define my axes.

Defining The Axes of Food

There are some general factors that will affect the food you choose on Deliveroo — price, for example, or how quickly it will get to you. The former is less interesting to me as I’m trying to avoid traditional demographic segmentation and the latter should always be as fast as possible on Deliveroo so isn’t a useful variable to plot.

There are some factors though, that are more about personality– they describe the mood and situation you may be in, regardless of the cost and convenience.

Factor 1: Are you a food snob? Do you eat to be seen? Will you only eat something with a Michelin star, or are you happy with your local (as long as it’s clean and friendly)?

Factor 2: Are you eating alone or with others? Be honest, how often would you cook a three course dinner on a Monday night for your GoT TV meal? We go to more effort and pick certain food types when we’re entertaining friends.

Factor 3: How healthy are you? Do you know how to say the word quinoa, with confidence, in public? Or do you love the grease and you’d stuff a crust with anything?

Factor 4: How brave are you? Do you eat what you know? Or will you go for the Hungarian cold fish stew? Do you see a restaurant experience as comfort food or a culinary adventure?

So with these factors in mind I can now plot them onto my grid.

I know. This looks pretty incomprehensible at this stage. So how about we define some of the food zones you could end up in at any point in time.

Dirty is on the left, healthy on the right
Alone is the top half, together is the bottom half
As you get towards the centre, people are braver and more snobby (so the outsides are more familiar).

This means that the top left hand square UADF is generally reserved for meals you don’t want anyone to know about, in stark contrast to SAHB which you’ll sing from the rooftops.

In fact, it might help if we put some foods into these boxes to make it extra clear. Clearly these foods are subjective– one thing that we see every day is how much perception of a food type changes culturally across cities and countries.

I know what you’re thinking. Indeed, I reckon in one day I could tick 4–6 of these boxes off.

What we’re looking at here isn’t describing someone’s food personality for good — in fact hour by hour I’d be jumping around the board depending on my mood.

Mind Blown

Here’s the thing. Because the food you want is always based on your context, we can’t create traditional personality types here. Even the most ardent yoga-loving clean-living Spiralizer™ can fall off the wagon and nail a kebab, given enough time and alcohol. This is more of a ouija board of food sins, where we can watch ourselves tracking grimly from the bottom right with our post workout rabbit food all the way to the top left of doom, tinny in hand, stumbling into next door’s garden to throw the remains of our large Doner at their cat.

So how can we use this? Well, perhaps the C.U.M.F.I will help us at Deliveroo map our own users’ food habits. Maybe we can ask them to self-identify as one of these types before ordering, to better offer them what they want? Perhaps we can map the faintly disgusting eating habits of the average early twenties male and create a wildlife documentary? The world is our oyster (or kebab).

Knowing what people want and how best to give it to them is the most important job that we have. So even though the C.U.M.F.I is a bit silly, it’s rooted in a real need. When you’re hangry and want food NOW, every second that we can speed up your ordering experience by is vitally important. Winter is coming, you need sustenance.

Take the test!

You can find out where you stand by answering these four questions.

Are you feeling unfussy about the place you eat (U) or are you a food snob (S)?
Are you eating alone (A) or in a party/group (P)?
Are you after something dirty (D) or something healthy (H)?
Do you want something you’ve had before (F) or are you feeling a bit braver (B)?

This should give you four letters which may put you in a box on the **C.U.M.F.I. **Good luck and happy eating.

Originally posted on the Deliveroo Design blog here

Observe Orient Decide Act (and repeat)

Sat, 03 Jan 2015 12:01:00 GMT

This is part of a series about meaningful side projects: read the first post here. It’s aimed largely at those designing digital products but may be relevant for anyone creating user-facing stuff — for example film-makers, writers, fine artists, photographers etc. as well as designers.

One challenge that small companies face, but actually has relevance for anyone building a product or service, is how to get to the right answer fast. Being ‘agile’ is seen as pretty important at the moment, but it’s pretty much impossible to get it right first time.

So when starting a major project, whether you’re a company or an individual creator you want to make sure you’re getting to the most meaningful possible version of what you’re doing in as short a time as possible. It just makes sense.

Enter the O.O.D.A. loop.

*The ‘O.O.D.A. loop’ shows an effective way of moving quickly and getting to the *right answer.

‘In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries … or, better yet, get inside [the] adversary’s O.O.D.A. time cycle or loop.’

The brainchild of military strategist John Boyd, The OODA loop was originally devised to explain the outcomes of dogfights — how could a slower fighter jet with lower capabilities be able to defeat a more technically advanced machine? The answer lay in the pilots ability to more quickly percieve and react to his surroundings — to get his O.O.D.A. loop to be shorter than his opponents (one answer lying in a wider range of vision from his cockpit).

However this O.O.D.A. loop provides a nice way to explain the importance of a short ‘sprint’ or release cycle when creating ‘products’* for people. The quicker you can learn, the quicker you can improve and get ahead.

So how do we apply this methodology to our everyday work?

Rather than cracking open your design tool of choice on day one of a project, start by asking questions and observing behaviour (Observe). Use your learnings (Orient) to build a prototype (Decide) in as short a time as possible, throw it out there (Act) and watch your user again.

The idea is that the faster your ‘O.O.D.A.’ loop is, the quicker you’ll get to a useful and usable product. So if perfecting the bevel on your button doesn’t contribute to that speed of learning, why are you doing it?

Observe: Go to the people who you think might be interested in your idea and check to make sure. Think about how you want to frame your idea to get honest feedback — the last thing you want at this stage is a sycophant telling you the sun shines out of your idea’s arse, only to find out in 6 months that they hated it all along.

Orient: This is a hard one, not just because you need to master an analytics tool of some sort but also know what it is you’re measuring. Measure the wrong thing and you can be left with some assumptions that are just plain wrong. (For example check out the dangers with mixing up causation and correlation). If you don’t have any users, you’ll have to rely on qualitative tests (with individual users or friends) — just be aware that each only provides one data point so may not be statistically significant.

Decide: Based on your learnings revisit your designs and make improvements. The best improvements are small ones that you can test individually — change everything and you won’t know which change was effective.

Act: Release your improved version to your users. They’re getting real value quickly rather than waiting for a future ‘silver bullet’ release and you’re able to learn again.

I’m aware I keep saying product, but this should apply to anything which could involve an iterative process, for example film or music.

Read my first post about side projects here

This article was originally posted on my medium blog

Aspiring to design in a product team?

Sat, 03 Jan 2015 12:01:00 GMT

There’s limited value in 365 half-baked thoughts, but lots of learnings in one big success (or failure).

This article is really aimed at designers aspiring to design digital products but other creative types may find it useful too.

To set this in some context, I trained as a ‘graphic designer’ — in fact my first job was designing expensive coffee table books. I quickly moved into the world of digital marketing, working on big brand campaigns before jumping again to where I am now in a product team. The subtleties of my changing job title to me represent chasmic shifts in what I do on a day-to-day basis. Due to my slightly unconventional route to where I am now I’ve learnt the hard way how different the skills are that each discipline requires.

Alongside this I started a side project in 2009 that is still going strong and has spawned several other interesting opportunities. In fact I would attribute a lot of what I’ve managed to do to experience gained from running a small non-profit.

A lot of designers get bundled into one pot, which in ‘product-land’ we might call visual design — making stuff look pretty. For the aspiring visual or graphic designer access to showcases of good work are easy to find, from Dribbble to Behance and Brand New to Creative Review (as well as the visual design of every website and app around). What isn’t at all obvious is the design process that lead these people to their final execution.

By their visual nature these showcases form the accessible face of the design process and therefore the easiest to understand and emulate. This natural bias isn’t a problem for the majority of designers, agencies etc., but it makes hiring a designer into a product team really hard work. Designing a product emphasises the end user more than any other design discipline — you live or die by their opinions and habits.

This opens a whole world of design disciplines alongside visual design (User Experience design, User Research, Interaction Design, Information Architecture and prototyping to name a few) and as a product designer for a small company you need a knowledge of all of these to be truly useful. Plus there’s the additional soft skills of time and project management, prioritisation and data analysis that can only be learnt the hard way.

There may feel like a hundred designers for every job going when you’re looking, but we find that of those hundred designers very few are the ’T shaped’ people that we look for. In fact our most successful route when hiring is often referrals, just because cold-interviewing brings in such a variety of different types of designer.

So how do you go about changing your skill-set if your current job or course isn’t teaching you half of the skills you need to succeed? There are of course a multitude of resources online, as well as courses that will help you learn. But at Osper we believe in learning by doing and anything theoretical seems one step removed from the stuff you care about — namely your own work.

So here’s my take:

At university I remember being set the challenge of coming up with 30 treatments of an idea in 30 minutes, drawn on a 5x6 grid of squares. So for example if your theme was ‘Apples’ you would probably draw an apple in the first square. By your 6th square you’d be on Steve Jobs, and by the 15th you’d be stuck. Pushing through that barrier was where the good ideas lay. As an analogy I think it holds true that if you start and finish a piece of work inside a day, you’ll probably only come up with a single solution and execute it. You’ll have no time (or need) to iterate on, test or validate your work, so who really knows if it’s any good?

How about taking on something altogether more scary. Rather than splitting your year into several small projects: Commit to a single side project that has to last a year.

Some potential outcomes of 365 one day projects vs one 365 day project

What would you like the outcome of a year-long project to be? I suspect somewhat different to 365 one day projects. Your project (or product) would need to:

be something for real people, not just for yourself or your portfolio.
be able to prove itself in the real world, with measurable results.
be iterative (starting with an MVP that can be shipped in a day or a week.)
survive after the initial ‘honeymoon period’ when you (for example) have to spend days building email newsletters.
potentially have legs beyond that first year and turn into something bigger, as that’s what will keep you going.

Whoa nelly! but I’m a commitment-phobe and this all sounds like hard work!

Well, yes and no. Doing one day projects is fine and safe (after all if someone doesn’t like it it doesn’t matter, you only did it as a doodle anyway). Taking something on for a year requires a level of commitment that induces a monster *fear of failure. *But if you care about it more, so will other people.

In return for your time you’ll be rewarded by a far better understanding of the full stack of design in a product company and a project with much more meaning and worth. You have a real excuse to hit up your design idols for advice and you never know, you may even make a bob or two.

And just think, a year may sound scary, but taken one day or one week at a time it’s no different to a series of smaller projects, it’s just that each one builds on the last. The best thing about doing this will be the story you can tell to a potential future employer, investor or co-founder. Whether your idea was a success or a failure, you’ll know why and you’ll have the battle scars to prove it. Believe me, it’s completely invaluable.

Of course, it’s possible you won’t enjoy it at all. That’s fine too, it’s better to find that out in your own way than make a big leap into the unknown when theres a career/mortgage/baby clothes riding on it.

Everyone’s got a big idea in them. Bite the bullet. Sink or swim, you’ll learn a hell of a lot.

Here’s some (hopefully) useful links:

What is Product Design? — huge hat-tip to Eric Eriksson for this great definition.

GDS Design blog — one of the best web products about today, run by the UK Government and making government services easier for everyone.

The Mom Test — A great read about user research and ‘how to talk to customers … when everyone is lying to you’

The UX Crash Course – Joel Marsh gives an insight into some simple UX rules

User Onboard — Completely fascinating tear-downs of the onboarding processes of your favourite products by Samuel Hilick

Flinto — Of the multitude of prototyping tools I’ve used this is the easiest and the one I keep on coming back to (and my friend Kam wrote a great how to guide here). For mobile prototyping only though.

I’ve written a bit about a basic agile process that may help you get cracking with that mega-project. Read it here

This article was originally posted on my medium blog

Meeting Mr. Goldie

Sat, 22 Mar 2014 12:01:00 GMT

Goldie, aka Clifford Joseph Price, can safely list amongst his achievements: DJ, producer, actor, reality star (x4), and for the longest part of his career, artist. Both product and founder of the early nineties Jungle and Drum 'n Bass scene, Goldie rose to fame partly through his pioneering 'timestretching' technique and partly due to his more structured classical-esque approach to music-making, allowing his 1995 album Timeless to help progress the genre beyond its previous confines of rave material to a more respected art-form. The title track is a 21 minute epic that literally ebbs and flows like a symphony. (He later blew that out of the water with 71 minute-long Mother, released 2 years later.)

This natural ability led him in 2008 to a second place in 'Maestro', the BBC's orchestral conducting reality TV show behind The Great British Bake-off's Sue Perkins, by far his most successful foray into reality TV. Other outings on Celebrity Big Brother (2002), Celebrity Mastermind (2009), Strictly come Dancing (2010) and Come Dine With Me (2010) saw him faring less well. He's also appeared in several films including Guy Ritchies Snatch and Bond meh-fest The World is not enough as well as a two year stint in Eastenders.

Goldie in his paint room

However, most importantly Goldie is also a fine artist.

I first met Goldie, bizarrely, because he wanted to buy a piece of tree off my dad. A storm had blown a large oak down in the churchyard of St Lawrence Church in Bovingdon, Goldie's home village, and as the parish vicar my dad was in charge of removing the wood. Goldie successfully negotiated a slice and I went round to see what he was going to do with it. It turned out that it involved chainsaws.

Goldie the artist today has evolved from Goldie the graffiti artist of the 1980s. His graffiti work in Wolverhampton in the 80s took him to the US where he also started selling grills (gold teeth) in New York and Miami. This love of graffiti still pervades every element of Goldie's work as well as his home - spray cans are still the central focus though are now tempered with raw wood, elemental and found objects, lots of varnish and even sculpture and photography. He recently sold a solid bronze and chrome skull – complete with gold teeth – to ginger strummer Ed Sheeran, turning down an offer from 1D fop Harry Styles in the process: 'I didn't even know who that guy was, but Ed and I are mates'.

It's an objectively huge set of achievements to notch up in one career. But upon meeting Goldie it became immediately clear that this is a man driven to create to the point where he may never be able to stop.

I turned up at Goldie's house with a camera and my laptop to see him bombing out of his drive in a white 4x4. A bit odd, I thought to myself - We'd texted each other only ten minutes before to confirm. Nonetheless I knocked on the door and ended up hanging out with his wife and daughter watching Cbeebies for 20 minutes while Goldie went to pick up his mate from the station. Suddenly he turned up, bouncing off the walls about the home-made salt fish fritters he'd been presented with and hugging his wife 'I'm the luckiest man in the world, I swear', before I managed to tie him down for long enough to take a few photos, all the while Goldie talking non-stop and me cursing the fact I hadn't tuned on my recorder yet.

Finally, photos over, I managed to get him sitting down for a chat about the youth of today, harnessing creativity and where he gets his drive.

Goldie's home art gallery

I was 9 when Timeless came out and our readership were still swimming around in their dads balls.

Left testicle or right testicle is determined by whether your dad was creative when he put it in there.

Is that true?

Apparently so. Obviously this generation is very different - the difference is that parents can sometimes become friends. Technology has folded time. Back in the 70s when we were sneaking out the fucking window and no-one knows any different with our parents knocking on the door 'Are you there darling, are you there?'

It's purely because a a generation very in touch, with social media and whatever. I remember looking at a picture of my dad, wearing a check plaid suit with his foot on a log, and I'm thinking 'who is this black guy from the islands' you know? And then I look at my daughter who's 16 now asking if she can borrow my Stussy jacket.

That's what happens with technology. If you think you're insignificant you should try sleeping in a fucking tent with a fucking mosquito. We're at the end of Moore's Law(1) now and we need new ways to handle technology and apply it to society because it's getting out of control. Let's hit that send button BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE BYE do you know that Somerset's underwater?We have no reality because it's on a fucking laptop. It's been warped by technology and science while schools are way behind.

When I was stealing paint at the humble age of 17, at least I had an appreciation for the amount of paint I had and what I'd gained for a period of 6 or 7 weeks, collating a quantity of pissy paint so I could do my next wall. No different than the schematics of making a record, waiting in line, cutting a dubplate, sticking a label on it, going to a club, queuing up to see Fabio or Grooverider, handing them the record, sitting on the dance floor waiting for it to get played. It didn't the first week, it might have done on the third week.

It's all fucking disposable now. We're in a world of technology, but what's tangible about it. Do you have a craft? If you close your laptop can you do anything?

If you were 18 again now, what would you start on?

I can tell you what not to do. All kids will do this, you'll rebel, you'll sniff your fingers, you'll wank, you'll chase the girl, all kids do that it's what they do. The only thing that separates us from animals is a toilet door and some wallpaper. What you have to work out is how to be individual in a world where everyone's the fucking same.

On monday there was that tube strike and I'd got to Highbury and Islington and it was like dead rising, like a video game. Everyone wants to eat each others faces off. The trolls are overground, they're going mad! My thing is even though I'm part of this human race I don't want to be a part of it. 15 years ago I wouldn't even let you blink at me but now I work doubly hard to not eye everybody on the fucking train.

I would study fucking hard. I would try and make my abstract life make sense when everything seems the same. When was the last time you had a real conversation with your dad? When was the last time you talked to your mum or helped her cook? So what, you're grown-up, you've got a pair of balls and you're shafting some bird called Vicky? I spent my entire life in care so now I find 'life' really worth living. There's not a day I don't get up and have that drive.

Where do you think that comes from?

It comes from abandonment issues and being misunderstood. Duh, I chose Drum and Bass and graffiti. It was about trying to experience life as much as possible, the good and the bad of it.

But you could have been a businessman or anything. Why that?

I could have been a good fucking crime guy. When I was a kid I did some really bad things. I knew I was troubled, I knew I had issues from a really early age.

Watch good film. Watch good documentary. Make stuff. Close your laptop for fucking one day of the fucking week. Get out more. Go and climb a fucking hill. Go and punish yourself in the gym. Go and run around the block until your heart wants to burst out your fucking chest. Paint until it makes no fucking sense whatsoever. Write words that fucking even Iggy and Bowie in the 60s would be proud of. Be experimental. The greatest thing comes from experimenting, being part of the fucking experiment.

I'm not asking you to stick fucking knives in rabbits eyes. It's about saying hey man, we've got to pick up the mess. I play to these kids and I think 'hey you look sad'.

What about social media?

It's the velvet claw. It feels soft and cosy but it'll claw you to death. Keep it at arms length. I use it, I have 60 odd thousand followers but I don't trust it. It's not real.

I went to see this native Indian, I'll never forget it. It's stuck with me all my life, he said I have a bowl, I've got this gift in my bowl, and it's my job to give this gift. With social media we take a lot but we don't give much back. It scares me.

You can sit on the internet and lose your life with whatever else is going on. Close the lid man, don't lose your life.

Everyone's very self aware right?

Yeah it's called the ego, and people need to lose that very quickly. We're all human, we all have 8 pints of blood and we piss and we shit. That's why I do Bikram Yoga. If I was 18 and someone told me to do some Bikram I'd be there like a shot. It gets rid of all of that stuff.

I've done more work while doing Bikram than I have in the whole rest of my life. I've been a drug addict, it's been all over the news. I've lost a lot of people, lost a few friends to that. Now I wake up every morning and I tell myself 'I'm going to die'. So heaven is this, here right now. This moment, the light hitting my face, I've got smell, I've got touch. You know what hell is? Not being to remember any of it.

If a buddhist chants for 25 years or a priest goes into a church for 25 years, do they get to go to heaven? I don't believe in that, heaven is now. So I think 'what can I do to leave my mark today?' Because there's no tomorrow, no future. We create tomorrow today.

Have you ever found that theres been something you haven't been as good at as you've wanted to be? How do you deal with it?

Yeah, ironically I could never read music. But it made me want to make music even more.

Was there a moment of realisation?

Yeah dyslexia. I've never been able to read well, I used to have to hold a ruler firmly under the line I was reading just to do it. I'd read books and read the same paragraph over and over again. But I like that because it meant I had to do it differently.

I think this may be a made up word but I use a Seancic method with music, pulling it vicariously through others. Like a seance, I work with engineers and puppeteer the music together.

Lots of cups of tea

What inspires you?

Bikram yoga, carving wood, walking my dogs and going out and playing music. I'm going to Misk in Russia, I go and play for hours, I don't look at my watch, I play until they're done. And experiencing life.

Anything coming up?

Yeah, Timeless is being orchestrated! It's going to be for the Melt Festival at the Royal Festival Hall. No-one even knows about it yet but we're working on it now. It's been in the planning for a while but it's finally going to happen.

Cracking, Cheers Goldie.

And suddenly Goldie's off on his next adventure. Who knows what it will be.

You can get info on everything Goldie online at www.goldie.co.uk. I strongly encourage you to also listen to Timeless on Spotify or the internets somewhere, it's a journey.

<small>1. A <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law" target="_blank">prediction</a> by engineer and co-founder of Intel Gordon E Moore, who claimed that the number of transistors in electrical circuits (and therefore the power of technology) would double every two years. It has so far more than come true.</small>

It's really Nice That

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:01:00 GMT

Every issue of ShellsuitZombie we interview a talented duo while playing a pub game. Having played darts, pool and, ahem, ten pin bowling, the logical next step was ping pong.

Grasping our bats were Will and Alex from It’s Nice That. Two 2008 Brighton grads, this duo now run a media empire with 26 employees, a magazine, a monthly readership not far off half a million people worldwide and their own design agency INT works. Not bad eh. Arseholes.

So, with sweaty brows, tight grips and intense glares, the boys began their epic battle – Alex starting off the scoring with a slightly pathetic serve. No-one would realize until later just how important this match would be for everyone present.

So who started its nice that?

WH: I started it as a response to a university brief. No grand plan, just trying to get a good degree really. It was a great way to remember peoples names and documenting the people who's work I was looking at anyway.

We were working on a project called 'If you could' at the time while at Brighton. We were having all these conversations with creatives that we liked the work of at time. But then we graduated and got proper jobs. It was the January after that, January 2009, that we say It's Nice That officially started.

AB: Yeah that's when I got properly involved.

It quickly transpires that my questioning isn’t helping Will’s concentration. With every sentence he’s bleeding points, going down 4-0 almost immediately.

Wait so when were you guys Hudson Bec?

AB: Before that, but It's Nice That was getting so much more traction that we eventually decided to put it all into that. At that point I was still doing illustration, Will was still freelancing and we made the decision to go 50:50 and put all our freelance into that one bank account. If one of us happened to earn more money we'd talk about it but we were pretty relaxed. I think a lot of people when they set up companies together say 'well what if I'm doing all the work' etc. Wait until it actually happens because it may well not, it didn't for us. Four years on it's still fifty-fifty right Will?

WH: Yeah something like that...

Alex drew Will, because he's an illustrator

Will is now visibly annoyed. Alex had produced a long and impressively verbose answer with seemingly no adverse effects to his game. Clearly deciding that power would overcome, Will starts incessantly smashing every ball, with mixed results. 9-2 Alex.

So were you surprised when It's Nice That became so big?

AB: Yeah of course! You never expect when you start a blog that four hundred thousand people will start reading it.

WH: We started it at a time when blogging was very complimentary - you'd get a lot of 'via' and ‘link from’ which meant we grew organically.

Before twitter right?

WH: No actually Simon Whybray registered @itsnicethat and ran it as an RSS feed for ages

AB: Did he?!

WH: Yeah and I emailed him and asked him if we could use it instead and he said 'yeah cool go for it', gave us the password and off we went. It was really nice of him to do that.

Will, somehow, has hit some ‘good ones’, making Alex dive and grunt with his admittedly impressive returns. The crowd round the table is starting to grow, feeding off the restless energy of the ‘local derby’. 11-7 Alex.

Do you think It’s Nice That fuels copycat work?

WH: I think undoubtedly we've contributed to that discussion. But there’s a conversation that should happen more about where the line between 'influenced by' and copying lies. It's been happening for ever, it's just easier to find now with the internet.

AB: We've occasionally come under fire for being vacuous eye candy but we've always made sure we add content to what we do. We try to put a spin on it but we never claim that we're educating people - it's just nice stuff. We want people to understand it but we would never claim to be educating people.

Do you ever get frustrated that the It’s Nice That tone of voice doesn't let you spill rage on the internet when you've had a bad day?

WH: One thing I've realised quite recently is we got very lucky with the name. It's always put a positive attitude on anything.

AB: We can still critique stuff in a positive manner but we're not there to put up bad work or blast people. We're not like that, I don't want to put shit stuff on the internet. The name has informed everything we put on there.

WH: We’ve worked hard to make sure the tone is accessible and all ego is removed. You don't need to go very far to stumble across ego in our industry, we don't want to be that.

Will appears to power up, serving well to win himself five straight points from his serve. He wasn’t to know they would be his last. Alex returns fire with a serve so fast it breaks the window. The barman looks up and tuts.

Do you never think 'let's just get rid of It's Nice That' and just run a straight up design agency?

AB: Ha no way. I see It's Nice That as the sun - everything else would be dull without it. If anything else we look for things to add to it rather than take away.

And you still love it like a son?

AB: Yeah like an S-O-N! Will's got a real son now! Will, who's better? Your real son or INT?

WH: On record? Probably my actual son.

AB: I actually agree with you.

Do you have plans for the future that you can tell me about?

AB: First and foremost always keep doing what we're doing as well as we can. From the outside INT might feel established but from the inside we're always trying to improve and make it better. We also have this mantra across the HB group 'Make it better' so hopefully the next thing we do will be about making the industry or the world around us a bit better.

Do you worry about putting something out that doesn't live up to the INT standard?

WH: I don't think there would be anything that's dramatically under. What's interesting about launching the magazine under a different name and the shop under a different name is that we can test it and make it it's own without changing the perception of INT. I still think that the biggest thing we will do will be bigger than It's Nice That. We publish to 400,000 people a month which is great but there's bigger audiences to be had.

AB: The problem with Its Nice That is we will always be talking to a niche audience - if we can find something more universal and be nimble about trying new things then that would be great.

WH: The magazine is a prime example - we stopped the magazine in its old form because we evaluated what we needed from it and thought there was a better way. We've always been able to decide what to start and stop and we will always remain independent.

But with 16 people on the payroll, you can't exactly shut down the blog eh.

AB: People say 'isn't it scary that you have to support all these people?' I don't think it's scary, I get to work with great people every day.

The atmosphere is now, frankly, feral. Will has taken a second bat off the wall and is performing Darth Maul-like gestures and noises. Alex is now topless and has spread tomato ketchup on his torso like Bruce Lee. The Book Club has never been so full at 3pm on a Tuesday, thick with the smells of sweat, ketchup and testosterone. It’s jolly exciting.

So who would be your dream interview? Who haven't you landed yet?

WH: Hmm, great question. The balance is what's exciting. If we only talked to our heroes it would be a bit boring, and if we talked to graduates it would be a bit boring.

AB: Alex Ferguson.

WH: ….

AB: It's not always about people inside the creative industry - I'd love to talk to someone outside our world who's got such a stance and made such a difference.

Finally, you guys have been put on a pedestal as 'the graduates that did it'. Any pressure from that?

WH: Really? We don't feel like that at all. The only time we notice our progress is Christmas. When everyone's gone home and we're the last in the office we can look around and say 'oh there's a few more computers on desks than there were last year'.

AB: For our events we always close the studio - everyone has to help lift bags and set up. Everyone's stressed out in the day but at the end of those days when we've done it that’s the most satisfying thing.

Alex finally finishes off Will with a choke slam, breaking table in twain and releasing a shower of sparks that rises, meaningfully, to the heavens. Everyone takes a moment to think about what just happens, before lifting Alex aloft. There’s some confusion during which the crowd dissipates, leaving just Alex, Will and this intrepid reporter. The final score? 21-12. The victor, Alex.

AB: Another game?

WH: Mate, we could play this all day. I've got to go.

Thanks for everything guys!

INT: No worries, laterz.

This article was originally posted in ShellsuitZombie magazine issue 4 in June 2013, which you can see here.

Visit It's Nice That online at itsnicethat.com

Not bowling with Tim Key

Tue, 14 May 2013 12:01:00 GMT

As is the tradition at ShellsuitZombie magazine, we like to interview our stars while playing a minor sport. First it was pool, then darts. For this issue we invited multi-award winning comedian and poet Tim Key to join us in a round of ten pin bowling. Except, as is tradition, it’s all a lie. Well, unless he was emailing me from Hollywood Bowl in North Finchley. Which would be an extraordinary coincidence.

After much trash talk, Tim Key (35, Famous poet,comedian and star of Mid Morning Matters) and I finally agree to meet up at Hollywood bowl in North Finchley. By the time we are through the shoe swap Tim is already complaining about Hygeine standards and I’m starting to wonder whether this interview will be a shambles.

Tim’s reputation as the supposed kingpin of the north London comedian’s bowling circuit obviously precedes him, as both the manager of Burger King and several of the slot machine regulars give him knowing nods. I suspect that Tim Key is about to wipe the floor with me. But I don’t care. I just want a chat.

Having entered his name somewhat intimidatingly as just ‘KEY’, Tim strolls up to the lane and unzips his custom ball bag, revealing the orb within.

Do you like ten pin bowling?

Yeah I do, so this is perfect for me. I play at Rowans in Finsbury Park whenever I can. My ball naturally curls to the right so I have to start it off left and then watch it arc back and into the front pin. Once I got 3 pins down with one ball.

It was to only be the two pins this time. Happy with this, he sits back, smugly cracking open a diet coke.

When we first met I showed you creepy pictures on my phone outside the British Library. How did you feel about that?

I didn’t feel great, obviously. I’m a busy man and I already had my cycle helmet on, then I have you in my face swishing through photos. I kept looking at my watch and shifting from one foot to the other. And yet still you swished.

A recurring theme in your poetry is the everyman - this comes across most in the names you choose for your characters. Whats the best name you’ve ever come up with? Is there someone you wish you could just put into every poem? I.e. Rob Pacey, Mark Davenport, Andy Waugh and Mike Abbot the peacocks.

Tim whips another ball down the alley before replying, nailing one pin without touching any of the others in an impressive feat of accuracy.

There are some names I keep going back to. Rod Wilde is one. Also Chris White. When I wrote my last book I had to do a search for Chris’s and change a few out. For some reason I’m really attracted to that name. If someone’s burning an umbrella or eating a chive in one of my poems, it will usually turn out that he’s called Chris.

Hmm ok. It’s definitely Mike Davenport for me. So what came first, the poems or the comedy? I read somewhere that you said poems seemed like an obvious next step after finding stand-up tough. Any truth in that? Or did I just make it up in my head?

That’s come right out of your head. What’s wrong with you? No, the deadened months after I knocked stand-up on the head were filled with writing a one- man play. I then started working comprehensively with gap-toothed comic Alex Horne on his Edinburgh shows. Gradually I started writing verse to fill up tube journeys. Before I knew where I was I had a whole notepad full. At this stage my momentum took me back onto stage. Armed with this shield of Having seen two out of your three slut-based shows poems I was able to face down my audiences more effectively.

You’ve sort of created yourself a new genre somewhere between comedy and poetry. Is there anyone who has influenced you, any heroes? Or maybe not, you fucking maverick.

I’m a fucking maverick. I’ve never even seen any other comedy or read any poetry. I just tend to bowl and when I’m tired I retire to the tastefully done out bar next to the lanes and write some verse.

But I suppose Coogan must be up there, eh Sidekick Simon. Go on, he’ll be annoyed if you don’t mention him.

Oh yeah, I’m a big fan of Steve Coogan. I used to listen to his radio show when I was at sixth form college. We used to quote Knowing Me Knowing You a great deal. I don’t think it did me much good socially, but I guess it was all part of growing up. “Who were the bishops?”

Tim’s fifth round is a corker. Using the barriers to his advantage he deflects the ball off left, right then left again, judging the speed perfectly to stop the ball against the front pin. He sends another ball down to finish off the first.

So you’re a poet right? Tell me about ‘The Incomplete’ - sounds a bit ruddy serious.

Supposed to be. I just needed to pull them together. At that point they were just drifting round my flat on pieces of napkin and foil. It was time to catalogue them in a proper hardback. I tried to make it as ruddy serious as possible. At times I let it slip but generally I was pleased that I’d created an anthology that made you smile but also made you think and weep.

That makes me pleased also. So does this mark a permanent shift in your comedy or do you just have several strings to your bow? Are you looking for your first serious hollywood role?

I cannot get such a role because my skills aren’t strong enough. I think I will try and sneak into Hollywood through the back door in about ten years time. The most likely routes are (a) writing a role for myself, (b) starting as a runner and working my way up, or (c) screwing someone like Winona Rider or the lawyer out of “A Time To Kill” and hoping for the best.

Are you excited about the Olympics? I know you’ve got tickets. Maybe you could be an olympic ten pin bowler?

I’ve watched the skittles on Sky Sports 3 and those guys are immense. The Finns and The Americans are different class. They’ll make it swing way out wide and then banana back in fiercely. All the skittles fall down. I’ve seen it where a skittle has appeared to explode as the ball hits it. I’ve seen it where skittles have gone flying into the crowd and spectators have been knocked out or killed. I’ve had friends round and shown them this stuff on Sky Plus. It’s breathtaking.

Tim is in his stride now, approaching a fifty percent hit rate as he breaks the 40 barrier with ball number 12.

Having seen two out of your three slut-based shows (I missed slut in the hut unfortunately) and watched a bit of Cowards, I get the impression you’re a fan of ‘short film’ as a comedy medium. Any plans to continue down that road?

I think we’re going to go shorter. I’ve got a plan to film something on the top of a building. A fifteen second piece, me and a girl. The wind causing havoc.

That sounds dramatic. Having seen Edinburgh favourites like We Are Klang struggle with the telly, would you ever consider your own sketch/poetry show?

I’d always consider that. I’m constantly standing back and looking at my live stuff and trying to work out what it is. Whether it could work on Telly. What I’d have to lose, what I’d have to add in, how much money I would stand to make, whether I would sing my own theme tune.

Tims final round sees him emit a yelp and spill his coke a bit as he achieves a spare. It seems to be a career best for the young poet. After a victory lap and a high five with the manager of Burger King I manage to sit him back down.

How do you deal with your burgeoning fame while ‘on the street’, signing peoples appendages and being accosted and whatnot. Is this what you imagined?

More or less. Sometimes you have to be quite demanding about the appendage-signing. There are people who want your signature on a bit of paper or in a book. At that point you just have to be strict, and sometimes actually physically wrestle their appendages out and onto a desk so you can do a proper autograph.

You famously won a fringe comedy award back in the day with a Cambridge footlights show that you should never have been a part of, not being at the university an’ all. A bit of a theme for this issue is ‘strapping on a pair’ and that clearly worked for you. Any regrets or would you encourage future stars to do the same?

No, no regrets. I think if you’ve got a pair then occasionally I think you have to strap them on or you’ll get nowhere. I know for a fact if I hadn’t strapped mine on I would have ended up doing one piece of amateur dramatics before moving to Eastern Europe and trying to find work teaching lawyers before marrying some poor lamb in Kiev. It doesn’t sound that bad now I think about it. Maybe there’s still time.

Go on, write us a poem mate. Just a little one.

I’m not very good at writing poems on command. I once wrote one to a girl but that’s because I’d promised her one if she let me touch her hair.

Fair enough. Thanks for all the words and the wonderful game Tim.

No worries. It broke up my morning nicely.

Tim zips up and polishes off his diet coke, seemingly satisfied with a job well done. You can visit his website at www.timkey.co.uk or follow him on twitter at @timkeyperson.

This article was originally posted in ShellsuitZombie magazine issue 4 in June 2013, which you can see here.

At the time (mid 2013) he was pretty famous but last week I saw him on ITV's Saturday Morning Kitchen, so worldwide superstardom is surely only a half step away.

Placement Man

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:01:00 GMT

If you’re reading this in bed, tin of cold baked beans in hand and Come Dine With Me on the telly, probably recovering from a night out where your housemate puked in their own pants and you put it on Instagram with a tilt shift so it looked like the bits of carrot were made out of plasticine, the last thing on your mind is going to be getting out into the world of work before you absolutely have to.

And why should you? All that grown-up stuff can wait. Even with mere months to go, placements and, heaven forbid, jobs, seem pretty far away. Yes, the final project deadlines are looming, you’ve nailed your ideas and your presentation at your degree show is going to kick some serious ass. That kind of work is understandable, it’s for your degree, but real life comes after a summer of festivals and bleary sunburnt mornings in mysterious beds. Probably.

Well here’s another thing to consider: gaining a bit of industry experience is going to seriously help you out when it comes to getting to the next bit of your life as a creative. As often as not, creative studios are a bit like Uni. Yes there’s plenty of cracking work going on, but you’ll also be taking part in a great social scene and meeting people who will be useful lifelong contacts. As well as that, you get to learn how an agency works, possibly gather some nice live portfolio work and get a taste of working with people (great) under people (challenging) and for client people (more challenging). To top it off, agencies often don’t advertise junior positions, instead preferring to find young talent through internships, so you may just get an offer. Luckily for you, we have just the man to help you out with the where, why and how of the placement game.

Placement Man, aka designer Jake Jennings, has so far successfully completed nine placements since graduating from his design degree at Plymouth University last year. Among his battles he can list such huge adversaries as Hat-trick in London; Navyblue in Edinburgh; and even Pentagram New York. Along the way he’s accrued a comprehensive knowledge of how to find a placement, what to expect from it, how to make the most of it, and even convert it into a job offer (he’s had several).

Jake began networking before he left university, starting a Designers Society and holding events and lectures with speakers including Patrick Baglee (Navyblue) and Harry Pearce (Pentagram) for his contemporaries. However, it was a tour of 23 UK studios, portfolio in hand, that was to seal his first few placements, culminating in a month at Pentagram New York, after which he planned to settle down.

In the end, Jake explains, a combination of itchy feet and animalistic drive led him to carry on placement-hunting after returning from the US, something that he admits is often difficult to explain to people, the reasoning is that he still hasn’t worked out exactly what’s right for him. To be fair, it’s often hard to choose between a small or large agency, branding, packaging, print or digital without trying a couple out. Even hating an experience means you can cross one off the list.

It can also be daunting looking for placements, especially at the top agencies, but through Jake’s technique – a mixture of perseverance, charm and cojones – should see you through. (Though don’t carpet-bomb CVs – it’s easier to spot than you would think.) Jake says he has gained placements through email, face-to-face meetings and even Twitter, and would advise anyone else to do the same. Most importantly, he adds, don’t be disheartened if a company does not or cannot offer you a spot, just make sure you get their honest opinion on your work, even if it hurts. It will all help you to improve it for the future.

If a studio does offer you a placement but can’t offer payment, don’t necessarily turn it down – one of Jake’s favourite placements, Navyblue Edinburgh, were honest and after a difficult financial year said they couldn’t pay him but instead offered him the chance to work on a variety of live briefs which led to his work being shown to the client. However, beware of studios taking the piss, because some will (one studio had interns booked solidly for the six months after Jake, begging the question ‘Is this just free labour?’)

Some studios will also offer better work than others – with everything from being treated as an “artworker” to meeting clients and being fully involved creatively. Be prepared to make tea and suck it up (not the tea) if some of your work doesn’t seem overly stimulating. Studios often have peaks and troughs of exciting work anyway, but try to stay enthusiastic, make the most of what you’re given and become invaluable in any way you can (people still request the “Jake special tea” at one company he now freelances at having previously been an intern). The creative world is a small one, you never know who you’ll meet again.

But I had to ask, why spend 18 months bed-hopping round some pretty ropey sounding hostels and B&Bs, living out of a suitcase and having to relearn people’s names every other month? Well, despite those things the experience has been overwhelmingly positive, Jake says. There’s no doubt he’s well equipped to start up a functioning studio (having clocked so many) or freelance with all the contacts he’s gained, but he remains set on working full time in a studio for a couple of years at least. The question is, will Placement Man ever hang up his cape in exchange for a salary?

This article was originally posted in ShellsuitZombie magazine issue 2 in 2011, which you can see here.

Illustrations by one of my best mates Bora Demirbilek

Skyping Vince Frost

Sat, 06 Aug 2011 12:01:00 GMT

In ShellsuitZombie’s first international Skype interview ever we managed to get hold of Vince Frost, acclaimed designer, ex pentagram associate, winner of countless awards and founder of Frost design, an Australian powerhouse of fantastic creative work. The time difference meant that Vince was eating breakfast and this reporter was in his pyjamas (don’t ever say we aren’t professional) but despite that we managed to get through discussions on his work, advice for those starting out and his feelings on the royal family.

Vince, I first became a fan of yours when I saw your work with letterpress – are you still getting out the wood type?

Yeah, we used letterpress for an ad campaign for Northern Territories a few years ago. It’s a pretty raw place, it felt right to use that kind of imperfect typography. My dad used a letterpress so I was influenced by that and I love the work of Alan Kitching. Now though, working for a brand like Qantas, a wooden feel isn’t so appropriate. So I fit the medium to the job, I suppose.

Is there an area of design you’re favouring at the moment or is it a case by case basis. Is there something big in the next year that you’re excited about?

We have so much going on at any time in the studio that we’re working across all mediums. I wouldn’t be happy stuck in one area and though it creates more pressure, I enjoy working in a more general way. In terms of trends, we’re working at getting better at digital and collaborating with people who are excellent at that. I find online media hugely exciting, there’s a lot of potential there.

But you must still be a print designer at heart?

I started working 2 years before apples came out and even then they were basic, so yeah I consider myself print and there’s still masses of print in what we do. We also get involved in a lot of signage and I love branding - it’s great to work large and small.

As an ex pat Brit living in Australia is there anything about the UK that you miss?

I was born in the UK and spent a lot of time there, I lived there until about 7 years ago. I don’t get homesick as long as I stay busy. Luckily I live in a great country - Sydney is an amazing place to be and I still get to work around the world. What do I miss? I don’t really miss anything, though I always enjoyed working in London and being surrounded by people who have the same passion, being in such a creative country. It’s amazing the work that comes out of there.

So you have it pretty good in Oz?

Yeah I like it - I have three kids, we live 2 minutes from Bondi beach, ten minutes from work, it’s just easy. The thought of getting across London every day with people trying to run you off the road… (shudders [audibly?])

Since moving to Australia have you noticed any differences between education between there and the UK?

There are definite similarities – I’ve been involved out here in Australia – we have an internship program at Frost with flow of young talent coming in. I’ve always believed in doing that and some interns do end up working full time for us. The quality of design here is great - the world is smaller now with the internet so you find that the UK, US and Australian design is all good. The one thing that seems to affect design the most is language, you find that Japanese design is very different. Are you wearing pajamas?

Erm… yes. Sorry. You’ve had a well decorated career but the odd project has been less satisfying. How do you deal with being afraid to make mistakes? Are you still willing to try something out of your comfort zone?

It’s funny you ask that - we’re working on a new frost book and I was reading the one I did in 2006 and cringing at some of the fucking disasters in my career - I was telling it as it is and being too honest! I went there, it didn’t work, did that, it didn’t work, did this, it didn’t work, you know?

I’m definitely not risk averse, you take something on and know you’ll get through it and aim for perfection. Sometimes it doesn’t work quite as you imagined but 90% of the time it does. When I went to work in Japan to do Japanese Vogue it was a very exciting, challenging and flawed process from the start, and I have no regrets because I learned from doing that, and also learned that I love Japan.

So anyway yeah I looked through (sorry trees) and started panicking at the things that fucked up but I think people don’t tend to talk about the things that haven’t worked out when often that’s when you learn the most. You know though that whatever’s going on there’s going to be a tomorrow morning and you start to just enjoy the process.

You see a lot of people starting up straight from university in both design and illustration, what are your thoughts on that?

A computer and the internet allows you to work from anywhere and you don’t have to be a huge corporation to do great work. Having said that there’s no point sitting at home in your pajamas in front of a great computer if you have no connections. So whether you’re making those connections through another design agency or not, without that you’re in isolation and it will be difficult to be successful.

If you look at the classic design and advertising work none of it was done by individuals but now the lines between photographer, illustrator and designer are completely blurred, and at the same time big companies are losing out to small ones whose marketing directors are seeing as doing ‘cool stuff’. Big agencies provide security in how a project is managed though which is where individuals may struggle, but someone could be sitting in the outback in a tent and designing the cover for New York Times magazine for example. It’s just about finding the opportunities.

How do you mean opportunities?

Well just imagine the tens of thousands of people in your one street alone. Just think about what they do, what their family does, there’s thousands of connections there. I know if I’m at a conference or event and instead of sitting on a table with a glass of wine I go and talk to just three strangers, (I’m a bit shy so it’s difficult to make that first step, I usually need 2 glasses of wine!) something might come out of that. I was in a conference yesterday and a guy sat next to me was from Brighton where I was born. The woman next to him was from where I grew up in Vancouver. I was going to just sit there quietly but I never would have met these people.

What advice would you give to someone starting up?

Identity. Think of any design agency identity - they’re traditionally bland and minimal so as not to distract from the work, but with the momentum of social media, Facebook and stuff, your personal identity is increasingly important. So for someone new you have to to think hard about positioning yourself uniquely and establishing that personality. The amazing thing about design is that it’s so competitive but also so open, you can make yourself what you want to be and you can achieve your goals. If your goal is to meander along that’s fine but if you have drive and focus on what you want to do you’ll suddenly look back and think ‘fuck, I’m doing the work I was dreaming about.’ People ask me my dream job and I’m doing them every day.

When I was starting up I was doing little magazine projects and when they gained a bit of recognition people said ‘you’re so lucky you get to work on great briefs’. What are you talking about? It’s up to you to turn it into a great project. Thinking ‘there’s not enough money in it so I’m just going to bash it out’ is dangerous. Every single project has potential. Everything you do leaves a trail and creates a reaction. The things you’re doing today have come in because of something someone has seen months, maybe even years before. That’s something I never thought about at university.

What did you think of the royal wedding? Are you a royalist?

He was out here, whatsisname. On the front cover of magazines and that. I’m glad he’s thinning as much as I am! You know what, my dad left for Canada in ‘66, he was really pissed off with the class system in the UK. It still feels like that a bit you know? I don’t like to be pigeonholed, humans are meant to be free, I don’t care what school someone went to. Australians have a very can-do attitude, that’s what I love about this country. It’s not held back by the old-school school tie feel, it feels like anything is possible, which is really exciting.

This article was originally posted in ShellsuitZombie magazine issue 2 back in 2011, which you can see here.

Check out Vince’s work at frostdesign.com.au.

The great ape Dave Brown (Bollo)

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 12:01:00 GMT

One spectacularly sunny lunchtime, ShellsuitZombie managed to hunt down a rare Gorilla only common to Clerkenwell London. Dave Brown, most famous for his role as Bollo in The Mighty Boosh, spends most of his time as a designer and photographer producing (alongside Boosh work like 2008s spectacularly successful ‘The Mighty Book of Boosh’) beautiful printed stuff for clients like Universal and the BBC, as well as of course the odd performance to tens of thousands on arena tours around the country. It’s safe to say we were feeling pretty smug about trapping him in a pub in Clerkenwell (which happens to be just below his studio) for a pint and a chat about Design, the future of Boosh, Noel’s new book and photographing Julian Barrett and villagers in Ghana.

SSZ: So Dave/Bollo, what would you consider to be your main job?

Dave: I guess I consider myself to be a creative, the Boosh started as something I did with my mates as a laugh and it blew up into something huge. I’ve always had to juggle the worlds of Comedy and Design, quite often for me they overlap, obviously when you’re out on tour it’s all consuming but even then I’ve been known to be sat in my hotel room on a squeezing the odd freelance job in.

So you’ve always been freelance?

I couldn’t be full time, in the early days I needed the freedom to be able to drop everything and get involved in a Boosh project at the drop of a hat, so freelance was perfect, then just before the first live Boosh tour in 2006 I did something I’d always wanted to do and set up my own agency, aptly named Ape, with a mind to be more of a collective of creatives rather then just a sole trader. It allows me to get all the amazing creatives I’ve had the pleasure of meeting and working with over the years involved as and when I can on all kinds of creative projects.

It’s been pretty full on since to be honest, so full on in fact that I haven’t even had time to launch the website! It always gets pushed to the bottom of the to do list when I’m busy and then when I find the time to get back to it I’ve gone off everything I’ve done and start again. There’s a holding page up at the moment that says ‘Gorillas can use up to 52 different tools. They’re currently using those tools to build this site’. Well they’re obviously rubbish at using them because it’s taking them bloody ages to finish!

Would you say Boosh has helped the rest of your career?

I guess so, although you could also say it’s got in the way. I am doing a lot of books now as a result of the Boosh book but many of my clients haven’t a clue who I am. I’ve done work for Fearne Cotton, Ben Brooks, James Rhodes, Nick Cave and recently comedian Tim Key as a result of the book and Boosh work in general. BBC books actually just rang and asked me if I’d be interested in designing this years Top Gear guide to Christmas book! They’ve approached me because they said they loved the Boosh book and would like my take on things. Will be great if that’s true but I’m not counting my chickens just yet. I recently did an interview with Radio 4 where I went on a massive rant about Jeremy Clarkson’s stonewashed pumpkin arse not fitting into my Morris Minor so if they get wind of that it could be off ! (Ed.- Since doing this interview Dave has stepped away from the Top Gear job due to, shall we say, creative differences.)

It sounds like books are your bread and butter. How do you go about designing a successful book like ‘TMBOB’?

I don’t have a process, I approach everything from an idea, every brief is obviously different and I design to that, so it’s a bit worrying when people say ‘I love the Boosh book, can you do that for me?’ - I interpret that as can you adopt a similar way of approaching the brief rather than making it look exactly like the Book of Boosh. The Boosh book was designed around the characters really, the style and feel of each page born from an idea in the writing and from the vibrancy and diversity of the show, a 4 column grid with a consistent type style was obviously never going to work!

The Boosh book sold incredibly well, largely due to the popularity of the show, but we were also very keen to not just make it a standard off the shelf spin off shitty annual like most TV show books. Like all Boosh product, we’re very hands on, mostly doing it ourselves and we dedicate time and effort to make sure the final product is worthy of the show. That’s pretty unique to be honest. I think this attention to detail and quality control is what makes our fans so insanely loyal. We haven’t done anything new in ages but the books and DVD’s are still selling, purely down to the quality of the design of course!

Surely not everyone just wants you for your Boosh?

No, like I said, I have a fair few clients that don’t know I’m in the Boosh, in fact, a while ago when I was still freelancing, one client left me in charge of their studio before getting on a flight to New York, on the flight they watched a Boosh ep and saw me playing Joey Moose in the first series. They were like ‘Is that the guy we just…what the fuck?’

Bollo has played to some huge crowds…

Yeah the last tour we did was insane, Wembley Arena, multiple nights at Brixton, selling out the 02 two nights on the trot, it’s been a crazy time and I’m so lucky to have had those experiences, it is hard after a touring sitting back at a computer designing but I get my kicks out of the creative and I still keep a toe in show business with a bit of directing, writing and the odd gig here and there. To be honest it’s hard trying to keep it all up and sometimes I wish I just had one job to do. Design isn’t exactly a part time job is it! and I’ve also just had a baby girl, so lets just say I’m pretty tired and exhausted at the moment, I’m smiling though, honest.

What are you up to at the moment?

At the moment I’m working on a book with Noel called The Scribblings of a Madcap Shambleton, not Boosh related, it’s basically a book about Noels art and writing and I’m design and compiling it. There’s also a lot of my photography in it. It’s a visual bombardment of Noel’s mind really, paintings, sketchbooks, scribblings, it’s looking amazing. He’s pretty prolific, such a huge body of work. He’s been painting for years, unlike some famous freaks who get a set of colouring pencils for Christmas and decide through boredom that they’re now an artist. Noel can actually paint his tits off and does so every moment he gets and has done for years so at the moment I’m trying to get 530 pages down to 320! What’s really interesting about the work when you see it all together is that you can see how he writes to inspire his painting and he paints to inspire his writing, I know I’m biased but I love his stuff, if you haven’t seen it think Basquiat, Haring, DeBuffet, Magritte, Hockney, Aubrey Beardsley...

So are there any plans in the pipeline for the Boosh?

Well everyone’s working on separate things at the moment. Noel is busy doing his own show ‘Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy’ and Julian is doing a Russian play at the Young Vic ‘Government Inspector’. Those two have pretty much become Howard and Vince.

The last thing we were working on was the album. I was told when I last heard it about 3 months ago that it was 90% done and it sounded immense then so no idea what’s going on! It has all the tracks from the show reworked, longer and better as well as new ones written for characters, I reckon they all stand up in their own right, even if you’d never seen the Boosh I still reckon you could get into it, the new Crack Fox track is incredible! It’s a great album, people should have it in their ear holes right now.

People always ask if The Boosh have split up, I guess its inevitable when nothing new has happened in a while but we haven’t and stuff will again, Noel and Julian do things when they’re ready, they’ve produced so much material over the years, they’re just having a break at the mo. There’s still loads of stuff on the table that’s never seen the light of day, but they’ll do it when they’re ready and when they do it will be great. They just need to find out where that table is...

Is the passion still there?

Yeah of course, always will be, for them and for me. You always come back stronger after a holiday, just maybe a little sunburnt, haha.

So I hear you’re involved in some charity work. Fancy talking about that for a bit?

Yes, I love talking about it! I have just become an ambassador for afrikids.org, A freaking ambassador! AfriKids is a charity focusing on child rights in Northern Africa - They’ve been an absolute joy to work with, I’ve done some fundraising for them as Bollo, I’ve rebranded them, not as Bollo, and I even got the opportunity to spend some time in Ghana last year seeing their projects first hand. I was filming and taking stills for their library, it was an incredible experience - it sounds clichéd and worthy saying it was life changing but it was. The Upper East region of Ghana is an amazing place, the people are beautiful, many of them have next to nothing and yet they’re so welcoming, so happy, so positive and an absolute joy to photograph. From a portraiture point of view it was incredible. You expect a certain amount of shyness or self awareness from someone when you stick a big camera in their face but everyone there was so natural and un-effected. They would just look right down the lens without a hint of embarrassment or effect. I couldn’t stop taking pictures. I need to go back, there’s a chance I will be involved in an ambulance convoy driving donated medical vehicles and equipment from Southampton to Bolgatanga in Northern Ghana next year, imagine the photographic opportunity there! There’s a book in that... If I could do anything I’d be travelling the world taking pictures

How does that compare to shooting backstage on tour?

Worlds apart in terns of there being more more booze, hairspray and ... erm ... humous but actually not that different from a photographic point of view, its still about getting yourself in the right place, sensing when to be anonymous and when to get in amongst it. I’m lucky with the Boosh obviously because I’m an insider, it means everyone acts as if there wasn’t a camera around, except Rich of course who turns into a complete psycho, nutjob, showoff whenever any recording equipment appears. He’s a shy intravert mouse normally!

The trouble with me taking all the backstage Boosh shots is that I’m never in any of them, but then when we get photographers out on tour to shoot us I always feel for them because they usually get nothing! Especially when they’re big personalities and act all crazy and hyper like that’s what we react to! I always smile to myself and think ‘you’re not going to get anything here mate, especially from Julian’ He rarely gives me anything photographically let alone a strange cool cat called Moses in his silly hat and mad trainers wondering why in every shot he has of Julian he’s talking or eating!

I can imagine him being a pain in the arse

Not at all, well, maybe just a little every now and then but aren’t we all? He’s also the most truthful loyal down the line no shit guy you’ll ever meet, he’s also fucking hilarious and one of the best comic actors out there.

How did you meet?

Me, Noel and Nige (Boosh animator and co creator of Noels new show) went to see Julian do standup at uni - he was fucking amazing. Noel had wanted to go in for an award which Julian had won the year before, the daily telegraph open mic award, so thats why we saw him … I think … but then they met in Edinburgh and both got signed to the same management company and started writing together. Then they did three years in Edinburgh before the radio and TV shows. Being there from the off means I have photography all the way back to the source, I plan to do an exhibition and book some day of the lot, maybe next year, I think its 10 years since the first series? I may be wrong, my mind is mash, too much humous on tour.

OK We have some questions from ShellsuitZombie readers. Graeme asks: Where are you Keeping the severed head of the honey monster?

Ha, I don’t know where that is. It’s probably behind a bin backstage somewhere in a Scottish theatre. The last gig on our last tour was in Aberdeen, I don’t know whose fucking idea that was. It was a great gig and the people were amazing but we it did feel a bit of anti climax, although the journey back to London was ridiculous, it felt like it was half an hour! The honey monster head, I don’t know, it’s probably in Peter Kay’s bed, discuss. Holly asks: Do you find yourself grunting and acting like a primate after being onstage?

It’s the most powerful thing to be in that costume, and acting it – especially in real life situations, I’ve found that out when I’ve been doing charity work, fundraising in banks and stuff, getting in lifts and acting nonchalant amongst business men and women. Some people react well and have a laugh, embrace it, others desperately try to ignore the fact that they’re standing in a lift with Gorilla, others have massive heart attacks and die at my primate feet. It’s weird for kids because they either run up and cuddle you or freeze, have meltdowns and are forever scared.

A friend recently did a film with John Landis [Director of American Werewolf in London and Thriller] who is apparently obsessed with monkey impersonators. He has a room in his house dedicated to all the monkey actors of the world and reckons he can tell who is in any monkey suit in any film anywhere. So he asked my mate for a signed photo of Bollo and I had to send him a strange signed shot like those ones you see in New York dry cleaners. Still, now I know I’m in John Landis’s monkey room I sleep better at night.

John asks: In the Bollo Cadburys ad parody is it you in the suit?

Of course it is, how very dare you suggest otherwise...

Which is your favourite episode?

Milky Joe is awesome, I love Nannageddon and Old Gregg and in series 3 it’s got to be Eels. Its tough to pick a favourite, I genuinely piss myself at most of them even when I watch them back now.

Is anything ad-libbed?

Yeah, have you met Rich? Ever tried to get him to say the same line twice! It’s always where the best stuff comes from, harder in TV land but on tour its encouraged and is always where the gold comes from, also keeps you alive, when you’re doing 6 shows a week for four or so months you need to keep it fresh.

In fact, there was one thing that Bollo had to do in the live show, rolling a big prop offstage. One day the caster caught and I stacked it, incidentally ripping my leg open in the process. It got the biggest laugh of the night so I carried on doing it for the rest of the tour!

Thanks Dave, it’s been sweet.

No worries, nice to meet you.

And with that, like an ape in the woods, he was gone.

This article was originally posted in ShellsuitZombie magazine issue 2 back in 2011, which you can see here. It's the first of a few interviews and articles from the last few years that will appear on this site.

Incidentally Dave's website, Ape Inc., is ace. Go do a looky.

Pool with Creative Review

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 12:01:00 GMT

As a follow-up to last issue’s Pool-related D&AD interview, ShellsuitZombie decided to challenge another dynamic duo to a battle. This time it was to be the team behind @CreativeReview, the Twitter account belonging to the magazine of the same name which (at the time of writing) has not far off 400,000 followers, making it one of the biggest non-celebrity Twitter accounts in the UK. The authors, Mark Sinclair (Deputy Editor) and Neil Ayres (Digital Producer) or ‘Neil and Mark’ as their Twitter profile lovingly calls them, were about to flex their darts muscle in a battle to find one glorious victor. Or were they?

No, because the dartboard was in use. So instead we just sat down and had a couple of pints and a chat about Twitter, writing for Creative Review, Carp and mistaken identity. I might make up some darts scores, but they will strictly be to ‘add spice’. The winner will also be made up. Sorry Mark, I’m sure you’re great at darts really.

Mark steps up to the plate first, throwing a mediocre 31 points. Neil manages more, scoring an impressive 120 with his first three darts.

Hi Neil – could you describe your role at CR?

Neil: Yeah it’s changed a bit since january. I’ve been working at creative review for 4 years, before which I was at Design Week. I came from a print production background but when the decision was made to launch the new website I started doing the online production for creative review. What followed was a youtube channel and then Twitter.

Do creative Review as a whole embrace Twitter as a valuable part of the magazine?

N: They do now, but when I first mentioned it people didn’t really get what the purpose of it was. It was very much ‘if you need something to do, go for it’. It’s worked quite well, definitely leading up to the tweetup for example.

Did that lead up to extra followers?

N: No it’s been very steady growth really. On one site we were ranked 38th in London, just below Andy Murray and just above JLS.

Mark: That’s where we see ourselves. (laughs). We have a similar number of followers to Wallpaper magazine, that’s quite a good comparison. Some celebrities are just on Twitter for an ego boost, they don’t really interact with their fans and that’s the antithesis of what we believe Twitter is about.

Twitter divides a lot of people, the ones that say they don’t get it are probably those who only ever followed celebrities and never got the conversational aspect of it.

N: Yeah I didn’t get it at first - I first noticed a famous psychologist had started a Twitter account just a few weeks after it launched and I looked at it and couldn’t make head nor tail of it. It was another 18 months before I got into it myself. Around when we started the CR account a couple of years after that was a tipping point for Twitter, when it really boomed.

M: If you think about the things we’ve now done with Twitter it’s amazing that two years ago we had no idea what it really was capable of.

As a Twitter user I feel like even though Creative Review has over 390,000 followers now, if I say something to them they will get back to me. Though it’s a huge account it feels approachable.

M: Speaking to friends on friday night they were amazed by the amount of effort we’ve put into something they see as essentially a gossip tool, but doing Twitter effectively involves interacting and talking to as many people as we can. If you ask us a direct question we’ll try our hardest to reply, and when others see us doing it it becomes much more of a method for interaction and feedback.

N: A lot of people will only interact with creative review through our Twitter feed. We never mentioned that we were even a magazine on our Twitter description for ages, which has recently changed, but there are thousands of creative review readers that have never seen or heard of the print magazine.

Have priorities changed at CR post social media?

M: Not really, everything still points back to the print magazine. At the same time though, we see the blog as a sister publication to the magazine, not an offshoot, or the print magazine made digital. It’s doing its own thing. If you go on the blog, or on our Twitter, the magazine is very different to that. Circulation of the print mag is good but it’s been hard for everyone over the last few years. When the ‘work’ section of CR was dropped for the ‘crit’ section, that I look after, that was the print mag reacting to the current climate in a way - ‘news’ making way for more in-depth articles. If you get a new piece of work on the first day of print production, it won’t be published for 4 weeks, by which point it will have been blogged everywhere.

Yet people who subscribe to creative review have shelves of creative review. It’s very collectable.

M: Absolutely, it may be a cliche now but the tactile quality helps.

N: Also though the breadth of work has also increased. I’m not a designer but i’m interested in illustration and comic books and the magazine now caters for a range of tastes.

M: That’s why the Twitter feed has worked so well too. We can now flag up all sorts of things, not just design and advertising.

Do Creative review have a Facebook page too?

M: Yeah it’s been bubbling away for a while

N: We even have a myspace page!

M: Do we still? I thought that must have gone the way of … well … myspace. One thing I’ve noticed about the blog is that it tends to kick off quite a reaction. There seems to be hot topics…

N: There’s just one isn’t there? Logos.

M: Yeah it’s usually rebrands of household names. That’s why we did a logo edition of the magazine, we know how contentious that subject it.

Do you look for that?

M: Yeah we like it when it’s a good debate. There’s a fine line between good debate and a slanging match and we’re very cautious now that we don’t let it get out of control. Usually what happens is that someone says a piece of work is rubbish, then someone else says ‘well your website is rubbish’ and then we have to remind people to not get personal.

N: What’s funny though is that for the recent T-mobile royal wedding ad for example, the blog kicked off in a negative way and all the while everyone on Twitter was very positive. The level of anonymity on the blog changes opinion.

M: We try to let as much through as possible, but people use the anonymity function to say some pretty nasty stuff and we have to watch that.

N: And then youtube is another world. We tried to moderate that for a while then quickly gave up.

M: It’s like a subterranean commentary, it descends into hatred very quickly.

M: Pint?

PINT.

Mark generously gets these ones in. This reporter has a lager, Neil has a disturbingly fizzy tap water and I can’t tell you what Mark has, he doesn’t announce it to the microphone. More fake darts is played in this time but I won’t tell you how much so I don’t have to add up the scores.

Thanks! Mark, what do you do at CR?

M: Well I’ve been at creative review for 9 years, I started as senior writer, doing feature and news writing. This was before we had a proper website, that only really got going 7 years ago. I now look after the Crit section and then manage regular columnists as well as any features I’m doing myself. That’s alongside trying to get out a couple of blog posts a day. As deputy editor I also have to step into Patrick’s (Burgoyne, Editor) shoes if he’s not around.

Would you one day like the top job?

M: Ooh, what a question (laughs) I don’t think Patrick has any plans at the moment so… Are you guys aware of being quite a big voice in the creative world?

M: You get an idea of the magazine’s standing and reputation occasionally but day to day you’re so involved in it that it’s difficult to tell. I think it’s the same with any magazine, for the people who write it, it can be hard to tell what it’s like to ‘experience’ it. But you always have to remember that you’re writing to be read, if you know what I mean. And I enjoy reading what we write about...

So if you were into carp fishing you’d still look up to the editor of Carp Monthly?

M: Yeah, something like that…

Do you also look after the feed? How does one go about getting work into that?

M: We look at the feed a few times a day, and by no means everything is approved, so it’s an achievement to be featured.

N: Sometimes a piece from the feed will make it onto the blog too if it’s particularly interesting.

M: It’s great because everything has been written by the designer or creator and we don’t have to then go back onto their site to write a piece each time. We can just press approve, so it just has our editorial take on what’s interesting.

How do you feel about Twitter as a means of promotion, particularly as a graduate. If you’re not Creative Review but an unknown creative, do you think Twitter can be of value?

M: Definitely. There are loads of people we know through Twitter and that’s only because of one mention or retweet saying ‘check this out’ It can be a very easy way to get your stuff out there.

N: and you start to have conversations with people who you’ve met through a retweet. Our problem is that we try to follow as many people as possible but inevitably there will be some really interesting voices that you never see when you have tens of thousands of people on your feed.

M: The simple act of ‘following’ someone is such a simple way to start a relationship though.

I’ve noticed that Neil, you have an active personal Twitter account but when I type Mark Sinclair into Twitter I get ‘@TheDonutMan’. I assume this isn’t you?

M: Ha, no. I was preparing to a conference in Cape Town a couple of years ago and the press contact asked what I looked like so he could pick me up from the airport. He eventually emailed me a picture that he’d clearly found on Google of a well fed middle-aged looking corporate chap in a suit and asked ‘is this you?’ Seriously.

N: You’re completely offline Mark. But at least you managed to get your name on the CR profile. If someone then knew it was a magazine and went to the website they’d work it out.

Mark isn’t very good at fake darts, missing spectacularly and impaling the barman. Neil, akin to Robin Hood, casually throws his next dart, splitting Marks in Twain. Ignoring the bleeding barman, he then throws his next two darts straight and true, leaving himself with just 40 to win.

Do you guys write outside Creative Review?

M: Yeah I’ve done a few projects, I’ve written a book too...

N: About comics. He’s going to plug it now.

M: Well it is available on Amazon for an insultingly low price. I do bits and bobs, the odd chapter and essay here and there.

N: Last year I did a few freelance pieces for magazines, I didn’t really enjoy it. I’m writing a science fiction novel though.

M: Freelance can be hard work, you have to go home and get motivated to write again, sometimes I’m very happy just writing at work!

Do you have a few spare copies?

M: Yeah I have about 20! I thought it would be great to have loads, but now I look at them and I’m like ‘Oh God, who can i send these to?’

OK on to degree shows. You must have been to a fair few, any thoughts or advice?

M: Theres loads of little ways in which you can make that experience more successful for you if that’s what you want. The whole ‘black folder’ portfolio thing is so off-putting for one - people don’t want to flick through loads of work. You think about when you go to an exhibition or gallery, people just want to go and look at great work. Also, if you’re there at your show, you can approach people and see if they want to know more about a piece of work. That can help too.

Do you think that theory works on Twitter too? Should you be shouting about your work?

M: Yes, certainly, but the other side is sometimes we get a personal message saying ‘Hi creative review, check out my work’ and then you check their Twitter page and they’ve sent the same message twenty times to different people. It’s the equivalent of copy and pasting an email and forgetting to change the name of the magazine. ‘Hi Creative review, I’ve been an avid reader of Eye for years now…’ It’s not the end of the world, but it can get people’s backs up a bit, and you only have to proof-read your emails to avoid it.

Mark then misses again. ‘MARK?!’, we all shout.

Final question - Any plans for another CR Tweetup?

M: That’s a really good question N: Are we allowed to say? M: There is going to be one on July 21 at Tate Britain, it’s a tie-in with the Vorticist exhibition they’re staging. It will involve creative participation online in the form of a Tumblr, and some involvement on Twitter. This is beginning to sound like a press release but we’re continuing to build on the first Tweetup. We’re going to post all about it on the CR blog.

That sounds exciting!

N: It’s going to be fun. Right, it’s time to get back to Twitter!

Neil then stylishly finishes Mark off with a double top, becoming the first winner of fake ShellsuitZombie darts ever. He would have looked proud and honoured (and probably made a winners speech) if I hadn’t made the darts bit up. There had now been a two and a half hour period of no tweets from Creative Review, people were starting to need their fix. It was time to go.

This article was originally posted in ShellsuitZombie magazine issue 2 in 2011, which you can see here. Neither Mark nor Neil work at Creative Review any more, which is a pity.