Process
How I design + why
As someone moved by the power of language, translation has always been a large part of my life. That extends to my work in product design + visual media. One is never alone on an island or without constraints, there are always multiple points to consider. Life itself is not binary and thus the power of design to shape that space, that nuance, holds vast potential on many layers.
Design Ops
Impact, craft + collaboration are what move me. I relish Design Ops with the end game of having creative freedom from well conceived + communicated constraints. Give me the freedom of a well crafted brief.
This forms the backbone of design teams + processes. Without a clear set of operations works is diluted, often overlapping + ineffective. Design Ops is the plumbing of the creative engine that is design.
Project work
I subscribe to a repeatable, scalable workflow that follows Austin Knight’s Think / Make / Check framework. Within each major project phase are the necessary steps to cover work of any size, from epics to tasks.
This is the vertical work that all designers do. It is the process of investigating, ingesting + ideating that we are all familiar with. It forms the bulk of work for most designers. The highlight of this system is that it is cyclical so can be applied to smaller or larger formats with each getting the appropriate coverage + incorporating UXR as needed.
Initiative work
Kaizen, continually raise the bar of your area of expertise + influence. Initiative work touches all the activities relative to pushing the maturity of any given design team. I’m a huge fan.
This is horizontal work with impact multiplied across teams. It includes often neglected areas such as user research, accessibility, design system, etc. How might we mature these practices within our sphere of influence to better serve our users + business?