Three years, four
disciplines, one practice

I started in 2023 at a kitchen table with a laptop, a domain and a great deal of unpaid work for friends. The first paying client was a coffee roaster who needed an online store in nine days. It went live on the ninth day, slightly crooked, and I have been reasonably obsessed with process ever since.

What I do now sits across four areas that most people treat as separate professions: web development, app development, UI/UX design, and brand and graphic design. The honest objection is that a specialist would be better at any one of them. My answer is that I sequence rather than juggle. One discipline holds the foreground for a block of weeks while the others sit in review, and I bring in people who are better than me wherever cross-disciplinary judgement is not the value.

The real argument for working this way is the transfer. A self-initiated year of ninety-nine interface studies produced the component library now sitting underneath two commercial products. Designing packaging taught me more about typographic hierarchy on a small screen than any product course, because both are ultimately about deciding what the eye finds first. And building the thing I designed means I stop drawing interfaces that are expensive to render.

Clients tend to be founders launching something they intend to keep, retailers moving off a marketplace onto their own storefront, and teams with engineering capacity and no senior design voice. Recent work has shipped from Johannesburg to Cape Town, Berlin, Tokyo and Mahé.

Outside the work: long drives on the coastal passes, a record collection that has outgrown its shelving twice, and an ongoing argument with myself about whether any site really needs that much JavaScript.