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My Cookie Popup Fantasy

When I was younger, before I could drive, I used to walk everywhere. Really long distances to go visit friends, get to school, or make my way to the mall. I didn’t have a phone, no music, nothing to distract me. So to pass the time, I’d fantasise.

Usually about winning the lottery.

I’m a visual thinker, so I’d go deep into it. What I’d do with the money, how it would change my life, where I’d live, who I’d help. The distances go away, I barely notice the steps while I’m deep in my thoughts. That habit stuck. I still find myself doing it now, especially when I go for long walks. Some days it’s wild ideas, others it’s dead serious. This morning, I had one of those moments.

If I had fuck-you money, one of the first things I’d do is take on the cookie policy popups that have ruined the internet.

I know there are far more important things in the world, but this has been bothering me for years. I’ve fantasised about all sorts of things, but today, that damn banner that invades my space every single day was the thing I wanted to kill.

I’m not talking about improving it or streamlining it. I’ve already looked into what it would take to challenge the rules around how these popups are presented, but if I had serious money, I’d go further than that.

I’d remove the whole thing entirely.

Hire the best legal team. Fund a challenge that forces regulators and platforms to come up with something better. Something invisible. Something smarter. Because this workaround, the thing we’ve all just accepted as normal, is a disgrace.

If you’ve ever worked with me, you’ll know how I feel about popups. I hate them. They’re one of the laziest solutions ever created, and when a popup shows up in a design review, I lose it. It’s always the last resort. I’ve never accepted that there’s no other way. There’s always a more elegant option. Always.

Cookie banners go against everything I believe in when it comes to creating great digital experiences. They interrupt, they repeat, they waste time, and 99% of people have no idea what they’re agreeing to or why it even needs to be there. So what’s the point?

We had an internet for decades without this nonsense. It was a better experience, simpler, more respectful. Now we’re stuck with the same clumsy interaction across almost every site, pretending it’s some kind of compliance win.

It’s lazy regulation, poor design, and a complete misunderstanding of how people actually behave online.

So yeah, if I had the money, I wouldn’t build an app. I wouldn’t buy a yacht. I’d go after the cookie popup. Because someone has to. And if no one else will, I’d be happy for that to be my legacy.

No click needed.

The Death of the UX Title

There’s outrage over the UX title dying. Shopify dropped the UX and Content Design titles. If you design, you’re a designer. If you write, you’re a writer.

Carl Rivera, VP of Product at Shopify, said it outright:

“We just dropped UX as a title at @Shopify. Same for Content Design. If you design, you’re a Designer. If you write, you’re now a Writer.”

Tom Scott backed it up:

“The ‘UX Designer’ job title is dying out. I can’t remember the last time I worked on a role with UX in the title.”

Andy Budd added:

“We will see more and more of this… saying everyone is a designer with only internal levels as a differentiator.”

There’s plenty of resistance to this shift. But I’ve been saying it for years. Most people with the UX title aren’t really designers. Or they are, but they’re not very good. They found something teachable, something systematic, and turned it into a career. It was never built on taste or instinct. The title gave them cover. That cover is disappearing.

Creative designers have always applied UX principles without needing to call it that. They were the ones pushed into UI roles because they could actually make something look good. Meanwhile, try giving a visual brief to most UX people and watch the panic set in. That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud.

Product Designer was a smarter title for generalists working on products. It reflected range. Not just wireframes and flows, but actual decision-making, visual polish, business awareness, and the ability to tie it all together. Some of that can be learned. Anyone willing to put in the time can understand it. But merging UX and business with creativity is something else entirely. You either have it or you don’t. The first sign I noticed was that the one-trick ponies still struggled with the creative part.

Most of the best hires I made came from agency backgrounds. People who had no choice but to adapt. They went from building websites and apps to social content, pitch decks, banner ads, and campaign visuals. They used Photoshop and Illustrator before they ever touched Figma. They didn’t follow component libraries. They built things from scratch. They had style, timing, and ideas. That’s what made them dangerous.

No, you’re not a designer if you use Canva. I respect what it enables. People publish. But publishing isn’t design. It just borrows from it. You’re copying someone else’s creativity, with no real context. And AI will only make this worse. The tools will spit out assets, but none of them will be original. They’ll be stitched together from what came before. Creativity has context. AI doesn’t.

Once this hype cycle ends, the same people will still be at the table. Most of them are closer to polymaths, able to adapt to anything creative. They mature by studying things outside their own craft. They develop taste. They sweat the small stuff. These are the black t-shirt wearing creatives who never stopped pushing. They’re not chasing the next job title. They’re looking for sharper ways to apply their thinking. They’re not rebranding themselves as AI consultants or whatever the next wave demands. They’re still doing the work.

There are people who write. There are people who design. A few genuinely do both. But if you’re not really a designer, you had no business taking jobs from people who are. The ones who can learn fast, adapt constantly, and still produce work that’s worth what they’re being paid.

And if that stings, maybe you’re not doing the right thing. Because if you were, you’d be too busy designing a new logo for your wife’s sourdough micro-bakery and having a proper laugh while doing it.

This shift isn’t an attack. It’s a reset. The industry is raising its standards and dropping the padding. Titles don’t protect you anymore. The work does.

So make something worth sharing. And put your name on it, not your title.

The Invisible Interface

We are entering a phase where the interface is no longer visual, but conversational. It is not about screens anymore. It is about systems. And right now, ChatGPT feels like the front door to everything.

What started as a clever assistant is quietly becoming an operating system. The recent integrations with Gmail, Docs, Calendar and other tools are not just features. They are signals. ChatGPT is no longer just something we talk to. It is becoming the layer we work through.

You could call it ChatGPT OS. And it changes everything.

From UI to AI
Traditional UI has felt stagnant for a while now. Add a few micro-animations, optimise a flow, reuse the same component library. It is useful, but it rarely feels new.

Now imagine skipping the UI entirely. Just say what you need. Pull data from one place, summarise it, draft a reply, send it. All within a single thread. The GPT becomes the interface.

This does not mean design becomes irrelevant. It means design moves deeper. We need to think about intent, memory, context, and connection. We are not designing buttons. We are designing inputs, integrations, and trust.

Voice, screens, and discomfort
Voice feels like the most obvious interface. Yet it still feels awkward in practice. Not because it is a bad idea, but because the execution is not there yet. These systems do not understand when to pause, when to interrupt, or when you are thinking.

And personally, I do not want to speak to my computer in public. I do not like the idea of people hearing my commands, or listening to my conversations. It feels exposed. It feels unsafe.

So while we wait for something like Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s mystery device, we are left with screens. Which brings me to a very practical frustration.

Why is the ChatGPT editing experience so cramped?
When working on longer content, the side-by-side view becomes messy. It forces output into places that do not make sense, and it decides on the layout for you. Claude gets this right with a clearer layout. But ChatGPT still struggles with space.

If we are serious about this being an OS, then it needs an environment. Imagine a widescreen mode with two clear panels. One for conversation. One for output. Nothing overlapping. Nothing shifting. Just enough space to breathe.

Building the invisible layer
The most exciting part of all this is the invisible layer of integration. What happens when you can say, ‘Add my Gmail here,’ and it just works?

Or will it require onboarding? Authentication steps? A smart way to manage permissions inside the conversation?

This is where the work gets interesting. It is no longer just product design. It is system design. We are building experiences across layers of intent, security, and automation.

That is the side of AI I want to be on. Not the prompt-generated visuals. Not the surface-level gimmicks. But the deeper work that shapes how we engage, how we connect, and how we build trust.

It feels like a natural progression. We started with how things looked. Then came the shift to why they mattered. Visual design gave way to design thinking. Over time, we embraced storytelling, systems thinking and service design. The work expanded beyond screens to include entire experiences and ecosystems.

Now we are entering a new phase. One where the interface disappears and the challenge becomes architectural. We are designing logic, flow and context inside systems that respond, adapt and learn. Every day brings a new interaction to define, a new constraint to navigate, and a new opportunity to shape how people work with technology, not just through it.

This is not the end of design. It is the next surface we design for.

Are you ready to build it?

System design: Block builders

In a big organisation, there are a lot of moving parts across various departments and projects and when the goal is to create a single design language, keeping a consistent design can become almost impossible.

My strategy for this was to develop a core design team who would be responsible for designing the individual components of our design system which could then be deployed and consumed by designers who worked within project teams.

This was met with a huge amount of resistance as people seem to think that having bums in seats within projects would speed things up and deadlines would be achieved. However, the goal is to have a consistent design and building up a living style guide would provide us with a platform that all teams could understand and consume the required components to apply to their designs.

Ultimately project teams should be more focused on other priorities like functionality, better user experiences and aligning all projects into the specific channels that will deliver these to the people who will use them.

In order for me to explain this over and over again, to which I have mildly had some success, I have managed to create the analogy that this core design team are busy creating the system. If I get my way, it will consist of pairing up designers with developers so they can develop these components and test, break and animate them before committing them or rolling out several static designs. I call these my Lego block builders.

Their responsibility is to make the Lego blocks which the Lego builders will consume to make the Lego models.

There is a very generic list of components almost every project may consume from (atoms), there is how you piece these components together (molecules) and then there is the way they work together (organisms).

The Lego builders consume this within their various projects and should they need a specific block that does not exist, it is their responsibility to identify it and bring it to the core design team who will then work with them to create the blocks and how they work together to deliver on the project’s needs, feeding back into the system for all other Lego builders to consume.

I have borrowed some language from Atomic design principles, and we have probably all played with Lego, so this should be language most people can understand.

I am often told that this is not agile and this is creating silos etc. Maybe, but it is necessary if you want to have a single look and feel that represents the brand consistently.

Spreading the design out across multiple teams, on multiple projects, in various buildings would simply not work. While I could move across all teams and keep alignment, the task is too great and much easier to control by giving out a set of guidelines for teams to follow.

It is a subject for another post, but living style guides and design systems are necessary and utilised by most big organisations who want to create seamless experiences for their customers.

Throwing tons of resources at this will not develop it any more successfully than putting a core team together who work with each other to solve the visual design challenges and deploy them into the style guide and then iterate accordingly.

I think the challenge is to identify the brick builders from the Lego designers who consume the bricks and make sure that there are still enough design challenges for everyone to be inspired no matter which role they are best suited to.

The other is getting people to understand the vision and hopefully make them understand that in order to be consistent and speed up the design process, a small core team is the most practical solution I can think of.

Why I subscribe to UX, but don’t call myself a UX Designer

Quite often when my friends introduce me to new people, they are unsure how best to introduce me, as explaining what I do is challenging, in truth, even for myself. But more often than not of late, I get introduced as a user experience designer, big thanks to my friends who always pop in “one the of the best …”, kudos! They call me this because I often talk about user experience as part of how I think about solving problems, and a practice I have gotten comfortable with, as I typed that I rolled my eyes, but I reluctantly use user experience as part of my thinking.

For me it’s all kinda simple, I design useful stuff that people simply love. The industry buzz word is user experience and it’s opened up an entirely new category of the team member in product teams and the like, who play not only a huge part in the success of a product etc, but they have huge clout!

I really believe that everyone is a user experience designer, as we are all responsible for the experience of the end user. But then that’s like saying everyone’s a designer because we all solve problems. Well, it’s how you solve those problems that define who we are and what we do.

Of course, given my constant attention I give to better experiences for users, or more specifically people, I am more broadly understood as being a user experience designer. But I am not. The guys that stand out for me as user experience designers might not be thinking on a whole other level as me, but they apply themselves on a level, I simply am not comfortable doing.

The thing that makes someone, specifically a user experience designer, is not purely how they think or the methodology they practice, but the tasks they do, such as user research, creating personas and hypothesis etc. There are lists of things user experience designers do, that I can do, that I enjoy hearing about, that I understand and I include in my decision making, but I simply don’t like to do myself.

I have been designing for digital channels and making stuff for nearly two decades and there are many I do well, but I am well aware that what I am when you strip away any fancy titles I might have received or called myself in order to qualify myself, is simply a designer. Where I practice my design is a whole other conversation. But what I am not, is a user experience designer, I simply subscribe to thinking and best practice and apply it to my work.

If only I could find a better handle for my social platforms, as I cringe that I still use @digiguru with all the misconceptions and remarks that name refers to, both the reference to digital, despite most of the work I have done has been in this gray area of what some people call digital and to sitting cross-legged in the lotus position somewhere on top of a mountain in the Himalayas.

iOS CarPlay UX Fail

Since updating to iOS 9 I am delighted to find new features that have been kept rather quiet. So stumbling upon CarPlay, I was curious to find out what that was. Well things did not go well. Immediately I was alerted with either turning on wifi or using USB. The problem is, I am sitting in a restaurant, no where near my car. So how do I cancel, go back to my settings menu?

I clicked on the wifi option as I have no USB on me, and my phone started searching with wifi for a car (I think). However I could now go back, but it was still searching for a car in the background.

That is a serious UX fail for CarPlay, whatever the hell that is. I would suggest that Apple either give the user the option to continue or cancel as this is going to catch a lot of people out and if you know how much battery power is sucked searching for wifi, this is an obvious fail.

FYI … So what is CarPlay?

According to the google search results…

Apple CarPlay is a smarter, safer way to use your iPhone in the car. Just plug in your iPhone and go.

But thats misleading, as according to the page the google results point to…

Available on selective cars, CarPlay is a smarter, safer way to use your iPhone in the car.

The key thing to note is that it’s only available in selective cars and by that you probably need a device that accepts this input.

 

2015 Web Design Trends

I recently taught a web design fundamentals course and at the end I shared some of the most common web design trends I have noticed during 2015. I have not and will not attempt to predict what will come, but there is certainly two obvious directions we seem to be going into. Firstly there’s the rich multimedia experiences, that care less about download speeds, but offer visitors something entertaining, something like Flash websites used to do, before Steve pulled the plug. I have a huge amount of respect for the efforts these teams have gone to, given how difficult this is to do with todays technology. The second trend is just he opposite, super simple sites that focus more on content, speed and minimalism. I recently re-designed re-aligned my personal site and unconsciously added a few trends without even realising it. I simply had no consistent images I wanted to use, so I decided the use of colour, large fonts and minimalism would suit me better. Hope you like my list.

Hidden Main Menus

With only a hamburger menu on the right hand side, the navigation is hidden, only on selection to reveal a full screen navigation that is hard to ignore. I’m sure there are other’s who may have done this before, but I first noticed that Teehan + Lax were early adopters of this technique.

Make it Big

Large full screen backgrounds are nothing new, but large fullscreen videos that seem to load relatively fast, are just epic.

Multimedia Experiences

The team at ultranoir have crafted an amazing online experience, the likes of which I have not seen since Flash ruled the rich media experience online.TimeSifht165 is a Digital & Interactive Fan Artwork inspired by the exceptional story of a unique French car : The Delahaye 165s and the amazing thing, is you can drive the car with your desktop keyboard or through your phone.

Patterns

I’ve started spotting patterns everywhere as a way of breaking the large device focussed stereotype layouts that were all of the web over the past couple of years. They re not only gorgeous, fill the screen, but they can be interactive. The light vector graphics also help with speed, but still offer a richer visual appearance.

Typography Microsites

It’s interesting to see a font get an entire site dedicated to it. Font microsites are popping up everywhere and none as slick as the FS Millbank microsite, which is gorgeous on any device.

Flat Design

Flat design is everywhere and with SVG being the preferred image format, I doubt flat design is going anyway any time soon. Love it or hate it, it makes sense in our multi device world where speed and vectors are king.

No more Boxes

It’s fantastic to see html sites breaking out of their grid like structures and telling stories in new ways. Again similar to how Flash sites were built, this is another tribute to the interactive era of the past, or maybe the beginning of an exciting future.

Simplicity

Simple, clean, content focussed sites that purely drive the message home make sense when we consider how despite faster internet bundles, the internet just seems to be getting slower.

No header background

Almost every template you find these days has the same large image background, and while we love the large format video experience, sometimes it’s simply lovely not having a large image in the background. Another great example of simplicity.

Very Large Typography

Someone commented during my course that this site reminds them of the mad men era ads, where there was a huge focus on copy driving the campaign message home. With the use of web fonts, we can pretty much use any BOLD font we like and do something beautiful with words and type.

Speed & Performance

I love how Google have stated that performance is a feature. Speed is super critical to users, UX people cannot stress enough the importance their research has identified speed as one of the most important things to users. But it’s more than that, with pages filled with all sorts of animation and other functionality, how fast these services perform is equally as important. People want a fast, smooth experience and taking into consideration speed and performance will ensure your site is a hit, not only with users, but with search engines too, who now rank you on both speed and performance. I think this will be the biggest trend going forward and as you might have noticed with the minimal websites above, simple is influenced by speed.

Non-responsive web design

I’m sure you have all heard the buzz words, responsive web design (RWD), adaptive or responsive sites. But incase you have been living on the moon.

Responsive web design is fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries. It was first defined in an article and a book by Ethan Marcotte.

To me, this term is already old school. If anything we should be talking about, non-responsive web design … websites that have not adopted RWD principles. To me simply, sites are responsive. We are so past the desktop browser being the only way to view a website. So please, if you haven’t already, do your people a favour and make sure you don’t have a non-responsive web design.

The only thing that’s constant, is change

In the earlier years of my career, I did much smaller projects. Microsites, personal sites, presentations etc. Then things got bigger, campaign sites, platforms, e-commerce sites and so on. Now days, I am very much interested in building product eco-systems, and I like to work on the same project for longer periods of time, by constantly iterating and improving things. I love how platforms like Medium, Pinterest and the like are always evolving the smallest details and constantly improving on their designs.

I could never have imagined that when I began my career, I was constantly about new things, but now the new thing, is a small detail that makes for a better experience for users. What I find amusing is that we used to redesign, and then make a big deal about it. But now we keep changing things, subtly as if no one will really notice, the site just kinda feels better. As they say, the only thing that is constant, is change.

11 Lives

I have been unsettled in my career for a while and I have been making plans to re-align my skills to get back to living the kind of life I choose to live. It’s easy to want to just stick to what you feel you know, but thats never been me, I always want to challenge myself, learn new things and grow, caring more for the love of the work I do than the salary I earn, despite being piss poor and in a world of hurt financially. So I was surprised to find a really great comic about life, that helped me understand my life cycles.

Basically it talks to the idea that we have several lives, not one and it is based on the theory that it takes 7 years to master something

View the full length comic

So for me my lives went something like this …

Self Discovery: 18 – 25

I dropped out of college, tried many different jobs, travelled the world, partied hard and eventually decided what it was I wanted to do with my life.

25 – 32

I started designing club flyers, then websites, became a multimedia designer, interactive designer and every other name you can think of to describe what turned out to be an interesting life working under the handle Digiguru, where I got to collaborate with and design for a whole variety of clients/brands across the globe.

32 – 39

I wanted to use my skills to lead others as a creative director at some of the top local agencies including Ogilvy, M&C Saatchi Abel and Black River FC, expanding my skills into to creative strategy, ideation and integrated campaigns.

39 – 46

I’m onto my next life, which is looking to return to a more niche discipline, focussed on user-centered design, hopefully as a product and user interface design director. The jury is still out on the title, but I’m excited to get back to a more hybrid role as designer/leader.

What are you going to do when you die?