Ant TylerI was back at the Otter Bench shooting some photographs in a Sussex woodland recently. The bench is carved from a fallen tree and sits near a chalk stream. It’s a great place for meditation and a calming place in a busy world.
It’s always great to get out and be in the outdoors even when there is a chill in the air, highly recommended!
The Otter Bench in Autumn
I’m embarking on new photographic project focusing on Shipwrights and traditional boat building. This will be mainly a portraiture project but with still life as I’ll be photographing in boat yards.
I aim to capture the craft and unique art of traditional boat building which is centuries old. I have some images for this project already and I’m in touch with boat yards in the south and east of England.
The shipwrights use traditional processes working in wood using hand tools and there is plenty of photographic potential in these busy work places.
I’ll post my progress on here as this project develops.
I’m pleased to say that I’ve now started my part-time Photography MA course this week. The part-time study has minimal contact time so I’m still available for full-time contracts with companies that employ flexible working.
I’m rediscovering earlier work and looking at photos that haven’t seen the light of day for years. Some of these images I’ve add on here in my Photography page. The below is one such image which I took whilst travelling in Canada.
Overall it’s great to be back and having time to focus on a slight shift in career path, a path I trod many years ago. I’m available for part-time work in product design, ui/ux design and photography so get in touch if you would like to know more.
I’m pleased to reflect on my recent career and the diverse nature of creativity and projects that I’m currently working on. My Lead UI/UX Designer role is winding up as I prepare for part-time study in photography. I want to continue working in the UX field as I really enjoy the creative aspect of my role and working with design and product teams.
I’m excited about doing more photography and starting new projects with old-school film and digital cameras. This work will be focusing on landscape and portrait initially but I will be working in other photographic disciplines going forward.
I’m also working on my solo singer/guitarist set with a solo gig lined up in Manchester in early September. This is a welcome addition to my band which have been going for a few years now.
I’m also writing more and working on my own songs for both the band and my solo work. I started writing every day in 2020 during lock down which I’ve kept up. I’ve started a book project which I hope to self publish when I feel ready.
So lots going on and the weather is great outside, whats not to like! I feel that these creative projects feed into each other and I’m really enjoying this experience. I’m building a creative future and I feel very positive about that prospect.
If you are feeling creative I would encourage you to just do it as there is no time like the present!
Working remotely as a designer can be challenging, even more so if you’re managing a remote design team as a lead or senior designer. Fortunately we have a lot of collaboration tools available to us to help this method of working. Industry standard tools such as Miro where you and your team can work on user flows and ideation whilst working remotely.
If you’re working as a design lead then keeping in touch with your design team is a great way to keep on top of the team’s work schedule. Regular one to one meetings where you can check in and give direction are great. Design team meetings are also good, even better if you can hold face to face meetings if the team member’s locations allow this.
I find that having a dedicated office or working space really helps, somewhere to assign as a work space. So when the working day is completed you can close the door and “commute” to your lounge.
Maintaining focus in the working day is something that needs to be developed with a routine and a work pattern. This can be modified depending on the project work in hand but a routine really helps with day to day remote working.
Keeping a healthy work/life balance especially in the winter months when the days are short is key, this is where a home office comes into it’s own. Also working for a supportive company that allows remote location working is a plus as then you can work from different locations in the summer months which can be inspiring.
I hope that this is helpful and that this can help you as a designer working in a wider team or leading a design team.
Wishing you all the best for the coming year! I hope that you will find creativity and positivity wherever you might be or go!
We’ve just released our mobile specific style guide, this builds on and compliments our desktop style guide which was released at the start of this year.
This guide is the latest collaboration with my design team, we have been working on this alongside new feature and BAU work. This guide captures our mobile optimised design patterns as they are designed and built into our app. The new guide also covers every component and design pattern that is currently live in our app.
Our new guide helps to ensure consistency as a single source of truth for our mobile development team and it will help with our onboarding process. It’s also another step towards a new design system that I hope to implement as a project that will further improve our new app feature to market speed.
I’ve just completed a mobile style guide to support our product team and further define our brand’s look and feel. This builds on my previous style guide that included desktop, responsive web and mobile.
Following considerable back end improvements our mobile team where implementing I was able to review several components for our app. This gave me a great opportunity to review the UX of our core functionality, we were also able to update our UI styling to a more contemporary look and feel.
Our mobile specific components were originally contained in one page of our divison’s style guide. The app design review highlighted the common components for our app and desktop and the need for a dedicated mobile style guide has been realised. This gives us much more space to provide guidance, examples and use cases for our mobile optimised components.
The new mobile style guide now includes comprehensive details of our mobile components. This style guide also builds towards a future design system that we can build at a later date.
Happy New Year to all! Wishing you all a creative 2023 filled with stunning design and beautiful UI/UX!
Well it’s been a while! But I was very glad to having bought my ticket and headed into Brighton to attend this conference once again.
Really good to see it up and running again after the break for the pandemic and good to attend a design orientated conference. I also caught up with some old designer friends that I’ve previously worked with in Brighton.
There were some inspirational speakers with the day’s theme being focused on Product Design and Management. As ever I took lots of notes to mull over and themes to explore over the coming weeks.
UX Brighton always inspires me and I enjoy the takeaways that I can bring into my design practice and career.