Atlas
A component library built for 2G connections. 14 kB of CSS, zero runtime JS, keyboard-complete out of the box.
YOUR NAME
Designer, developer and general maker of small strange things. I build interfaces that are fast, legible and usable by everyone — then I take them apart and build them again.
RECENT
WORK
Ten years of shipping. The short version.
EXPERIENCE
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2023 — NOW
Senior Product Designer · Northbound
Lead designer on the core platform. Built and maintained the design system used by 40+ engineers, cutting new-feature build time by ~30%.
- Design systems
- Figma
- WCAG 2.2
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2020 — 2023
Front-end Engineer · Meridian Labs
Shipped the public-facing app and rebuilt the marketing stack. Took Lighthouse accessibility from 61 to 100 across all templates.
- TypeScript
- React
- Testing
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2017 — 2020
Designer · Freelance
Brand, web and product work for small studios and independent musicians. Roughly 40 projects, mostly happy people.
- Identity
- Web
- Illustration
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2016 — 2017
Junior Designer · Studio Fold
Print and editorial. Learned to kern, learned to argue about kerning, learned to stop arguing about kerning.
- Editorial
SKILLS
Design
- Design systems & tokens
- Interaction & prototyping
- Typography
- Research & usability testing
Engineering
- HTML / CSS / JavaScript
- TypeScript, React, Svelte
- Node, build tooling
- Performance budgets
Accessibility
- WCAG 2.2 AA audits
- Screen-reader testing
- Keyboard-first design
- Inclusive research
EDUCATION & SPEAKING
- 2025 “Accessibility is a performance budget” — FrontConf TALK
- 2023 Workshop: designing for screen readers TALK
- 2016 BA Graphic Design — University of Somewhere EDU
PLAY
Things made for no reason at all. This is where the good ideas usually start.
PROJECTS
Selected work. Filter by discipline.
Northbound DS
Rebuilt a 200-page design system as 40 pages people actually read. Tokens, contrast rules and a public changelog.
Pixel Diary
365 sprites in 365 days, exported as a browsable archive with a colour-blind-safe palette switcher.
Readable
A browser extension that rewrites any page into a dyslexia-friendly reading mode. 12k weekly users.
Fold Records
Identity and sleeve design for an independent label. 22 releases, one very stubborn grid.
Redwriter
A tiny browser game about editing someone else's novel. Playable entirely with a keyboard.
BLOG
Notes on design, accessibility and whatever I broke this week. Occasionally useful.
FEATURED
Nobody reads your alt text, and that's the point
Alt text isn't a caption, a keyword dump or a place to be clever. It's a replacement. Here's a decision tree I've used on about 4,000 images, plus the three cases where the right answer is an empty string.
ALL POSTS
- 2026.07.14 Nobody reads your alt text, and that's the point A decision tree for writing alt text, and the three cases where empty is correct.
- 2026.05.30 14 kB of CSS is a feature, not a flex What actually got cut from Atlas, and what I put back in after user testing.
- 2026.04.02 Your design system doesn't need 200 pages How we cut the docs by 80% and adoption went up. Mostly by deleting opinions.
- 2026.02.18 Focus order is a story, and yours has plot holes Tabbing through fourteen real sites, in order, with commentary.
- 2025.12.09 A year of drawing one sprite a day What 365 tiny deadlines did to my taste, my wrists and my hard drive.
- 2025.10.21 Stop reaching for a framework to render a list In defence of the boring stack, with numbers from four rebuilds.
- 2025.08.05 Contrast ratios lie to you about grey Why WCAG 2 maths and human eyes disagree, and what APCA changes.
- 2025.06.12 Notes from rebuilding this site, again Third rewrite. No build step this time. Probably the last one. Probably.
GET NEW POSTS
Roughly one email a month. No tracking, no reposted threads. Unsubscribe in one click.
TALK
Work, collaboration, or just to say hello. I reply to everything.