I am Adam.
A UX designer
and WordPress evangelist.

My story so far

I am a multi-channel creative who has extensive experience in the realm of UX, web, digital and print design.

I started my career in a graduate role producing motion graphics and conducting an internal brand exercise for a mystery shopping company. Looking back, it was a great starting role because I got to work on producing materials for automotive companies with great identities and product photography such as BMW, Audi, Mercedes and Luxus.

This experience earned me my first in-house position at an agency that specialised in interactive design for mostly automative clients. It was in this role that I extended out into video production and began to learn how to build websites. I’m still quite proud of some of the work I produced for clients such as National Car Rental and Kwik-Fit to this day.

After feeling that I had achieved all I could at the agency, I opted next to go freelance under the same banner as this site now – Flint & Tinder. This switch pushed me more into branding design and prompted me to learn about CMS web development using WordPress as my platform of choice. Once I was able to confidently build custom themes from scratch, I felt I was able to provide complete end-to-end marketing solutions for my clients. I delved into SEO and got my hands dirty with client and project management and delivery.

Four years later however, I found I missed working with others. My favourite aspect of design is the collaborative problem solving and sparks of creativity they generate. So I opted to accept a Senior Designer role at what was Strawberrysoup. My role here was varied. I designed and I developed depending on what was required. I was able to offer the agency the ability to also deliver faster web solutions using WordPress and as an agency we began to implement UX practices into our projects for clients such as The Body Shop and Irregular Choice.

Because of my front-end knowledge, I was asked to oversee the work of offshore development teams for a large project for BT for the wider Sideshow Group that owned Strawberrysoup and that project led to another project at Specsavers.

I initially joined Specsavers in a contractor role, but after promises of career progression, unbridled opportunities and a significant pay increase, they convinced me to stay and I joined the company as the sole UX/UI Designer in the newly formed Digital division of the wider IT department. In this role, I got to work on a variety of projects, producing a catalogue of UX deliverables including use case maps, user journey maps, application wireframes and user psychology guides.

During this time I produced a heuristic evaluation for the Specsavers recruitment team on their existing UK careers website. After consequently convinced the department to sever ties with the external agency that built and maintained it. I then acted as a technical product owner for a new theme build produced by a branding agency in Denmark. After the theme was built, I then launched sites for the complete Northern European territories. Then, I re-skinned the theme following a major brand update for the UK & Australasian markets.

With all global sites launched, I then partnered with an external development agency to provide further updates and improvements on both the NE and ROW themes and delivered and managed a complex change process when the business HR systems – and corresponding API feeds that provided job data to the websites – were updated. I also prepared the sites for £30k worth of penetration tests that they passed with flying colours. And then COVID hit.

COVID changed a lot at Specsavers and a global restructure left me with lots to consider and a feeling I achieved all I could and unless the business wanted to heed and implement my advice to prepare and provision more for remote working that my future role was limited. So, I moved to a company that specialised in remote working software – Cloudbooking.

My time at Cloudbooking unfortunately lasted less than a year as it became apparent quite early on that the business didn’t share the same drive and ambition for design and change that I did and one day when I was contacted by an ex-supplier for Specsavers asking if I was interested in returning to the field of UX & UI design, I did just that.

And that’s where I am today. I am a Senior UX Strategist at Unipro. An agency that specialises in rapid application development using the Outsystems low-code platform. However, as is common in all the roles I’ve done, I do more than that. I have recently conducted a brand refresh for the business, am in the process of designing and delivering a new WordPress based website for the company and have produced app designs for the company’s biggest clients.

My philosophy on design

With that said, I also like to experiment and see opportunities regardless of media. With over 10 plus years of experience, I’ve worked with projects in all medias for a wide variety of clients.