Digital design + code

Swell Design Group are one of Australia’s leading creative agencies with a multi-decade history in branding, marketing, print + packaging, photography, illustration and physical design. I joined the studio to lead their small digital team and help define and elevate Swell’s digital offering.

Working in a close-knit studio of predominately design-focused creatives, my role includes both translating high-fidelity website and user interface design into pixel-perfect in-browser experiences, as well as crafting bespoke backends to help clients effectively author content and tell their story. That role is multifaceted, building custom WordPress and Shopify themes; designing API integrations; and developing extensible templates, component libraries and build + deployment tools to ensure the small studio is efficiently executing and exceeding.

With Swell’s history as a decorated marketing agency, I put a strong focus on SEO-done-right. The studio has a wealth of creative talent who produce unique visual design decorated with flourishes of animation, multimedia and gloss. That layer of paint must sit atop a technical foundation grounded in the often ‘invisible’ elements: accessibility, performance, modularity, maintainability, and inclusive design.

Leading a small team has also necessitated a number of additional roles, including hiring and mentoring junior developers; technical research, direction setting and training; technical proposal writing and scoping; and project management, marketing and presentation.

Culture Amp is one of the largest and fastest-growing employee experience platforms, helping thousands of companies build a better world of work. Founded in Melbourne and expanding around the globe, I joined Culture Amp during a period of rapid growth (and, coincidentally, in the same month as a global pandemic necessitated a mammoth shift in the way we work) to help build a lighting-fast suite of marketing websites which would scale alongside the growth of the ambitious startup.

Over an eighteen-month period I led the frontend-arm of a small team of designers and developers who would rebuild Culture Amp’s myriad marketing properties, lead-generation pages, and community resources. I scoped, proposed and championed a digital library built from clean mobile-first HTML/CSS/JS components. Those templates were integrated inside a bespoke Ruby-powered CMS, allowing Culture Amp’s web publishing team to effortlessly generate and monitor rich marketing and lead-generation pages. I also helped integrate numerous marketing tools and third-party APIs to aid the company in tracking leads and serving localised content.

Given Culture Amp’s mission to create a better world of work, the project was designed and built with a focus on performance, accessibility, inclusivity and scalability. We were able to achieve WCAG Level 2 AA certification across the build, as well as score perfect 100s inside Google’s Lighthouse performance and accessibility analysis tool.

An integral and senior member of a leading Australian digital agency which transformed over ten years from a single-location, four-person team, to a studio of distributed designers, developers and digital producers. I worked concurrently on a diverse range of projects and was directly responsible for both production work and project management.

In a fast-paced workplace with an ever-evolving toolset, I was diligent, focused and adept at self-directed learning, technical problem solving, leading project teams, effective remote work and communication with team members and clients across a wide-spectrum of technical literacy. I understood and embraced emerging technologies and had a deep awareness of context, detail, accessibility, communication and time management.

While my primary role involved writing HTML and CSS, working in a small studio necessitated a myriad additional skills which included copywriting, preparation of technical proposals and case studies, illustration, and video editing. I was also involved with recruitment, mentoring and day-to-day management of junior staff.