Designer who codes

A passionate frontend with an eye for user experience, who puts the user's needs first with responsible responsive design.

I aim to create websites that make users, clients and teams happy. True care for quality and web standards is what has always motivated me, so I approach work through progressive enhancement.

I like simple solutions to complex problems.

A technical designer

While I mainly focus on UX/UI design work now, my background is on frontend engineering.

Starting my career as a full-stack developer, I always worried about the experience of the people using my code, and took responsive design and web performance extremely seriously. Improving speed and flexibility was always critical, as it seemed my duty to avoid these roadblocks for the user.

Scott Jehl calls this responsible responsive design, but it can all be tracked back to this famous quote:

“Be conservative in what you do, be liberal on what you accept from others” – Robustness principle by Jon Postel

It was The Web’s ubiquitousness that made me fell in love with it, and it seemed unfair to limit user’s experiences only to save effort as developers. So I put my efforts into building robust ubiquitous experiences enhanced where possible.

This took me on a path of following great minds that I can consider colleagues now, like Jeremy Keith, Phil Hawksworth or Brad Frost, as we all share principles like Progressive Enhancement and Future Friendly Design.

As my experience working with digital products progressed, I realised more and more my passion for design was greater than expected, so I started shifting my career while freelancing to work closer and closer to UX designers and brand directors.

I am currently Head of Design at eola.

Design skills

I have taken ownership of full product design and product management decisions, both in the past and currently.

In terms of UX, I’ve dominated projects from forming personas, with or without a customer success person to partner with (as I’ve often had to be the one-man-band for all UX things) to developing user journeys and directing card sorting exercises.

As for UI, I’ve developed and grown full Sketch Libraries as design systems both as a design refactor and slowly grown others.

I’ve created and led consistent branding guidelines both through the interface components as well as the imagery direction.

Therefore, I’m fluent in Sketch, have worked less so but still some work with Figma, worked with vector animations and the standard Adobe Suite handling.

Technical skills

I excel at Sass and/or CSS, knowing how to set up a comprehensible design system and naming conventions for any given product. I’ve built design systems on React using Storybook all the way to Pattern Lab with PHP.

I can handle JavaScript from old-school prototype components all the way to modern ES6 arrow functions and modules.

Web Performance is an area I can easily improve massively as I have proudly taken many sites from 30 to 100 on PageSpeed, so everything from image optimisation and responsiveness to asset loading and priotarisation is easy-peasy!

Contact

Twitter: @jaicab_: For quick contact, feel free to send me a tweet!
Email: me@jaicab.com: Email me if it doesn't fit in a tweet or it's going to be a long conversation.