Hi! I’m Simon,

I got into product design sideways: web design first, then a detour into icon design.

At glyFX I spent five years designing icons and UI graphics for software companies, and came to lead the design team. That’s where I learned pixel-level craft, and what it takes to hold a team to a quality bar.

At Shiny Things I moved into product, and spent two years as the sole designer on Shape Lab, a geometry app for 5–7 year olds that we tested by teaching real lessons in real classrooms.

Then a decade at Bigtincan, as the lead designer on Content Hub, a sales enablement platform used by 1,000+ companies.

Each move brought me closer to the problem behind the interface.

What I believe

Technology should be a multiplier. The best tools let people do things that aren’t possible without them, not just the old things a little faster. When the tools I needed don’t exist, I built them: 14 Figma plugins for the design team, and an MCP server that lets Claude work with our design system instead of guessing from a screenshot.

Understand the problem before solving it. The problem definition is the part most likely to be wrong. When execution is cheap it’s tempting to build everything, but building the wrong things doesn’t make a team faster. On Content Management Modernisation, research showed our highest-value customers had the most friction, and wireframing surfaced a flawed assumption in the requirements before engineering started building.

Build less, sooner. Shape Lab was feature-rich by the time it shipped, but it took too long to get there. I’ve pushed for tighter first releases ever since: a template builder MVP in 6 weeks that kept an A$1M customer, and real-time collaboration scoped down to the tools buyers actually needed.