Jamie Stantonian

I have always been a diligent archivist, careful to keep track of everything I’ve created or worked on. My attic is crammed with sketchbooks, post-its and folded flipcharts, and my numerous hard drives are packed with information on every project I’ve worked on for over 23 years (over 400 in total). This page is an attempt to make sense of all of this information, and craft some sort of narrative around my professional journey, of the things I’ve made, the challenges I’ve faced, and the people I’ve met along the way. I’ve tried to avoid auto-hagiography and in this spirit have started with the dreary jobs I had as a teen and the ludicrous “startups” I attempted to launch in the wild-west days of the early web (should this be surplus to requirements, you can skip to Early Career). I want to keep it dignified, but also informal and honest.

My First Digital Design

1990

As luck would have it, my very first piece of digital design work was caught on camcorder back on boxing day 1990. After receiving an Amiga 500 for Christmas, I immediately set about using Deluxe Paint 2 to create an eyeball accompanied with the words “Thorax 2:Wrath of the Bluebottle” in chrome lettering. To make sense of this nonsense, you can take a detour to my childhood hobby of making cinematic posters for the games I played with my toys.

Frank’s Food’n Booze

General Assistant (1995)

A daydreaming youth, in my final years of school my parents were keen I had a taste of the real world and signed me up to work in a local convenience store. It had been a family-owned business since the Edwardian era as “Drybroughs”, but had recently rebranded as “Frank’s Food’n Booze”. Responsibilities included stacking shelves, mopping floors, and stock counting. It was a miserable experience of course, scraping up all of the ground-in animal remains from floor of the meat counter and heaving about crates of Hooper’s Hooch, but it had its intended purpose of exposing me to the reality of running a small business.

Marks & Spencer

Bag Packer / Operations (1996)

After a brief stint as a bag-packing assistant (my claim to fame that I packed the shopping of future London mayor Ken Livingstone), I worked for about a year in “Operations”. This involved moving crates of goods around behind the scenes and more paperwork that was really necessary. I have few memories of this job, looking back, but one of them was suggesting how to improve the reordering workflows using [any sort of software], and the other was that my supervisor was a pointillist painter and had one gigantic muscular arm like a Tennis player.

The Temple of Hate

Webmaster (1998)

As soon as my parents bought a PC and signed up to Compuserve, the information superhighway thundered into our homes. For me this was a schizophrenic world of charmingly naive chatrooms and rotten.com.

One of the hubs of the early internet was Geocities, and it wasn’t long before I launched my own site. The convergence of attention-seeking identity formation of early adulthood with a means to reach a global audience is, as we know today, a noxious cocktail. My generation is fortunate that so much of our formative years on the early internet have been largely lost to time, as this website “The Temple of Hate” was crammed with cringe-inducing attempts at edgy and/or zany humour. It did however represent my early forays into UI design and HTML. With, it is fair to say, mixed results.

Time Computers

Computer Salesman (1998-2001)

Before you can have a dot-com boom, you need to have a computer boom. And in 1998 I was part of the gold rush as a computer salesman at Time. For a chronic introvert, this was something of a torture, but I soon learned how to hone my interpersonal skills in the service of evil.

While selling computers was welcome, what we were really interested in selling was “Cover Gold”, an eye-wateringly expensive insurance package that amounted to a glorified phone-number and pure profit for the company. I sold over a quarter of a million pounds worth of computers.

2Talented.com

“Founder and Global Creative Director” (2000)

With friends from Time Computers, we schemed to make our millions in the dot-com boom, and our big idea was to have a space online where people could sign up and share their art. What was the business plan? What was the growth strategy? It is not clear now and was probably not clear then, but it was something to do with selling ads - but they were different times and DeviantArt launched six months after we began the project. The design was a big downgrade from the comparatively avant-garde Temple of Hate, and the code shambolic, as was the vogue.

Although I didn’t know the terminology at the time, it was also my first big “information architecture” problem; how to structure a hierarchy of different artistic genres? Our solution to the problem was haphazard, bewildering and amateurish. But we didn’t let our abundant shortcomings get in the way of further ambitions.

We dreamed of expanding it far beyond just artists. What if we made it into a place where anyone could promote their skills, like some kind of online CV where recruiters could go to look for talent? We pitched the idea to a PHP developer in search of help with coding, but he lamented that for the idea to work, we’d need to change how the entire recruitment industry worked. Deflated, and not exactly surrounded by support or venture capital we eventually admitted defeat.

Mengodz.com

Webmaster / Bronze God (2000)

Mengodz was an inside joke that got way out of hand. We thought the idea of us forming a boyband to be so hilarious that with the help of Alasdair Robertson (trumpeter with avant-garde “Remedial free-noise improvisation / spontaneous composition unit” Giant Tank) we conducted a series of gigs in various Edinburgh dive bars. The performances involved singing over the top of R Kelly songs and various 80s hair rock anthems. Design-wise, this was mostly a matter of written content and “branding”. Table-based layouts FTW.

Scottish Widows

Web Content Developer (2001)

My first proper internet job was a result of my being groomed at university as a source of inexpensive internet labour for local finance company. Here I worked on the redevelopment of the Consumer Website, Bank Website, Corporate Intranet and IFA Extranet and refined skills in tools like Dreamweaver 4, Fireworks 4, and moribund DHTML. This work involved interviewing stakeholders in regards to the redevelopment of the corporate Intranet. Made one friend here who spoke at my wedding; the dashing podcaster and future Twitter savant Stephen Graham, and my future business partner Jonathan Elliott.

Fraction Design (& Favours for Friends)

Web & Print Designer (2000 - 2005)

Following graduation, I gradually improved my design and code skills, taught myself Macromedia Flash, and began building websites for local sandwich shops and BnB’s for a few hundred pounds a pop. This was a combination of being the only internet guy in the friend group (free) and going door-to-door trying to sell my suspect services.

One recurring character I worked with was Thom McCarthy, a former Vietnam Vet turned Buddhist monk turned high-street entrepreneur. A fascinating and flamboyant character and pal of the Dali Lama, he ran a number of new-age shops in Edinburgh’s high street. With him, I worked on a variety of design projects, both digital and print.

Every time I went to his shop synchronicity seemed to amplify and strange happenings seemed to follow me for the rest of the day. The skeptic I was to come would be ashamed of my part in all of this energy-healing quackery, but I will always value my friendship with Thom and his wacky schemes.

Another client was Subway Cowgate, a grimy nightclub trying to freshen its reputation. I developed a visual style that tried to standardise the eclectic types of nights they hosted, with mixed success.

MOR Solutions

Freelance Designer (2004 - 2005)

During the glory days of the Celtic Tiger, MOR Solutions outsourced multiple print and web projects to to me on a freelance basis. Rather characteristically of the time, many of these were related to the construction industry in some capacity, such as selling timber-frame, tiles and blinds. Other projects were designing maps of the future ghost estates that would haunt the economy following the 2008 collapse.

ThinkBiggar

Creative Director (2005 - 2007)

Following the end of my contract at Scottish Widows, my former manager Jonathan asked if I’d be willing to be Creative Director of his plucky web design startup “Think Biggar” (It was a pun based on the Scottish town he lived in - Biggar - which as less than 3000 inhabitants). Nevertheless, thanks to Jonathan’s international connections - he was born in Zambia - we soon had a steady stream of very interesting work coming from Africa, including the Zambian Food Reserve Agency, and WIDnet, the Women’s Information for Development Network, and multiple projects for iConnect, Zambia’s largest internet supplier. This led to the one and only time I made music for a TV advert. No, I don't know why they didn't hire a Zambian musician either, but I was paid peanuts for what it’s worth.

Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Service (LBFRS)

Designer & Developer (2005 - 2007)

I suppose it is flattering that when I mention that I once worked for the Fire Brigade some people think that I was as a swashbuckling firefighter. Alas, it was as a flabby deskbound designer and developer of their public website and intranet. For the latter, I underwent a significant research phase that included many one-on-one stakeholder interviews to gain an understanding of the service’s unique culture. Founded in 1824, LBFRS was the country’s oldest municipal fire brigade and had somewhat eccentric traditions that I needed to carry forward into the new digital era.

In addition to visual design and frontend development, I created a large number of icons for use throughout the intranet system. I also wrote extensive documentation including information architecture schemas and sitemaps, as well as help files and training packages to ease the transition between the new and old systems.

The Sun Machine

Designer, Lead Developer & Editor (2001 - 2007)

The Sun Machine was at once an internet portal, the website for my “band” (me and some friends messing around of FruitlyLoops ), an online radio station, and an excuse to experiment with graphic designs and make sweary tshirts. The first generation of the site was a basic curated news aggregator akin to Fark.com, but it grew rapidly in scope and ambition.

This was during the apogee as my career as an anti-globalisation/pro-communist etc activist, when I was attending protests, hanging out with the Socialist Workers Party, boring people about the Zapatistas, reading John Pilger and credulously devouring Christian dominionist conspiracy theories. As such, an adolescent moralism runs through the whole project.

Some of the designs, in retrospect, must have gone viral, or whatever the 2003 equivalent of that was. All of a sudden, I was being contacted by people from across the world to have designs published in books, anthologies and educational journals, even featured in a movie (The Constant Gardner - I was paid £200 and it appears as a blur in the Berlin scene). In 2004, along with dozens of other included artists, I was invited to London for the book launch of Peace Signs: An Anthology of Anti-War Artwork in the famous socialist bookshop Bookmarks, where the posters were to be exhibited. Despite having it printed out of my own pocket, because the poster contained the acronym TWAT: The War Against Terror it was considered too offensive for the self-styled radicals that frequented the shop.

Regarding The Sun Machine, in the end our reach exceeded our grasp. Version 2 was made in ASP Classic and relaunched with tons of new community features and a custom-built forum. We even toyed with a native app on Windows Mobile. TSM Radio became a spinoff project that took enormous resources to run. A “Post MVP” feature, the ability to create and vote on lists of items, became another spinoff project called ChartNation, which consumed much time and energy, which then span off its own marketing campaign encouraging people to vote about who was the best Bond, to settle the matter once and for all.

Together with my partner in this project, Aynsley, we also decided to spin off the designs into a T-Shirt company, and we spent much time investigating printing technology, scoping business premises, designing catalogues and talking to banks. However all of this came crashing to a halt when, in 2008, I moved to Dublin, and began a new creative and professional chapter.

Evolution-E

Visual Designer, Frontend Developer & UX Designer (2007 - 2010)

My first job on moving to Dublin was with a small, family-run design agency called Evolution-E. There was a lot of work. Too much, in fact. At one point, our small team of 3 was working on 13 projects simultaneously and it was not uncommon to work into the small hours, grinding till midnight trying to hit all the deadlines. Additional stress was that client expectations were still in line with advertising and it was not uncommon to hear client feedback like “my wife doesn’t like orange, can you show me it in some other colours”. Once I was even made by a client to design his site like a PowerPoint presentation complete with <Prev and Next> buttons.

It was during this somewhat painful period that I began introducing wireframing and prototyping into the design process and trying to educate clients about separating aesthetics and usability. However, at least one client, bemused at the end of a Balsamiq demo, questioned why we took a “black and white” creative direction. I also created my own HTML/CSS framework to speed up the development process and adopted the project management software ActiveCollab to keep track of all of the various goings on.

The projects themselves were again characteristic of the Celtic Tiger; lots of recruitment companies and property developers. The most prestigious project was with the pioneering hair restoration clinic HRBR - hair surgeon to the rich and famous. And thanks for my early-onset bale-pattern baldness, part of my onboarding process was getting a free consultation by Founder and Consultant Surgeon Maurice Collins (great nephew of Michael Collins). Happy memories.

First Advertising / Firstcom

UX Designer (2010 - 2012)

This was the old-school Irish advertising company with the foresight to buy the domain advertising.ie in 2002 (as BBC Advertising). However, its owner, Conor Bofin, had recognised that although it was a powerful domain name, its legacy connotations still held the company back from realising its potential in digital era.

Here I engaged my full range of skills including research, prototyping, design, analytics, responsive front-end development, and integration of that code into a CMS (Expression Engine) - the entire project lifecycle. Notable clients included Aercap Holdings (the world’s largest aircraft leasing company), white goods titan The Glen Dimplex Group, enterprise developer System Dynamics, New Jersey’s Conti Construction and the Irish Independent.

The most colourful characters I worked with here was probably ITICA, the Irish Traditional Italian Chipper Association. My own Italian ancestors, who moved to the UK in the late 19th century were also chip-shop entrepreneurs as were many Italian immigrants. While Scottish Italians melted into the wider population, the families that constituted ITICA retained ties to the homeland and returned to their ancestral town each summer. This cultural cocktail was fascinating. In thick Dublin accents, they talked of fish and chips with the passion that an Italian talks about pasta. The group held their monthly meetings at our offices, which were like any other meeting until disagreements escalated, and they stood up theatrically gesticulating and shouting at each other in Italian.

The Square Tallaght

One client deserves particular mention. The Square Tallaght was once the biggest shopping centre in Ireland and was a long-time client of First Advertising. When the economy collapsed, the National Assets Management Agency took control of the company to prop it up, and began reviewing all of their contracts with suppliers. We were the only one of them who survived the audit, but were put to the test when asked to rebuild the moribund website.

A lot was at stake. When the shopping centre was built in 1990, it became the epicentre of the local economy and sucked all the business away from “Main Street”. As the centre slowly died, so too did the town itself, as families slowly started to move away to Dublin and elsewhere. It had, for good or ill, become the centre of the whole community. Rebuilding the community, then, was the central focus of the new website. Partnerships were developed with local newspapers, and we brainstormed ways for the site to become a central forum for local community oragnisers. The taxonomy of the whole site was determined by card sorting exercise at the centre of the shopping centre, and events were made front and centre on the site architecture, not shops and offers.

The site was relaunched with much fanfare at the centre, with bands, stilt-walkers and song. It was not the end, but the beginning of the recovery of The Square and the town. While the site itself is now long gone, the redesigned logo I made now stands proud outside the four entrances.

…

Conor, now retired, is now a multi-award-winning food blogger.

Fluent Interaction

Senior UX Designer (2013 - 2015)

Between moving back from Ireland to the UK (via India) I temporarily stayed back with my parents in Edinburgh. This would turn out to be an advantage when interviewing with Fluent Interaction in London, who had just kicked off a new project in the capital with Insurance giant Aegon. After running a series of sprints with the ethos of a startup, they developed a new B2C concept to encourage people to save for retirement; Retire Ready. A few weeks into the project a dropship of Deloitte consultants were deployed to deliver the project and we were left to lead the UX research and design. This was my first experience navigating a large, complex web of stakeholders with competing objectives, and working closely with large development teams. You can read my whole case study for Retiready here.

Under the tutelage of Paul Lakin and his talented team of UX specialists and researchers, I learned a great deal about the craft and learned to create much more sophisticated prototypes and how to sell and incorporate research into design on a regular and ongoing basis. I also worked on what I consider some of the most successful and intellectually satisfying projects I’ve worked on, such as the website of the Information Commissioner (where poeple make FOI inquiries) and the GSMA “Mobile Connect” - a service you’ve never heard of, now used by a billion people.

Another project of note was working with Fluent and Market Gravity develop some new ways for the Post Office to reinvent themselves, which involved creating a whole swathe of concepts to prototype and show to people. This involved probably of the most sophisticated prototypes I’ve ever made, this packaging designer I made in Axure. This level of fidelity may seem unnecessary, but really helped users engage with the concept in its totality, as opposed to static screens.

The Team

Senior UX Designer (2015 - 2017)

Moving to the Team on the one had was a tantalising opportunity to grow a UX practice, and a step back in time. I went from being on a team of UX professionals at Fluent to again the sole UX practitioner in a branding agency as part of a small but talented digital team. Our goal was to elevate the craft and practice of UX within The Team and with their diverse range of clients, even bringing in my former employer Fluent to help make usability testing a common practice. I advocated within the organisation for more rigorous standards of user experience, research, requirements gathering and execution and authored whitepapers and reports on technoheritage, VR & AR, and the near-future cultural and technological landscape.

Together with creative leads Kardo Ayoub and Anthony Coombes and two clients, we ran a one-week design sprint for estate agency TM Group as an attempt to digitally disrupt their own market. Thanks to the way property is bought and sold in England, “property chains” constantly collapse due to lack of visibility of the whole process. They had the vision of an an app that would aid communication and soothe nerves of everyone involved in the purchase.

For five days we hunkered in a war room, exploring the problem space and intensively designing and developing a brand direction as “Smoove”. By the end, we had developed an interactive prototype that we tested on nearby staff. Our delighted client responded that we had “done in one week what we couldn’t achieve in four years.” The product launched not long after as Mio.

One of the more conceptually interesting projects was with tech consultancy Avanade, who had long suffered from the problem of having the right skills and expertise for market demands. It is a challenge when winning a multi-million pound project only to find there is a shortfall in people who know the right development languages and software. The Skills Forecaster was a concept to be used across the business by people within talent communities and team leaders to try and assess what skills are in demand and which are in their twilight, and to rate these against upcoming opportunities.

Other particularly interesting projects require their own separate case studies; creating an interactive “experience centre” for G4S to sell security packages to airports, and refreshing the corporate site of NS&I. The website work we did for English Heritage also had some spin-off speculative design works, such as Timescope.

Webcredible

Lead UX Designer (2018 - 2019)

Webcredible had secured a solid reputation as one of the best UX agencies in London, so it was with some trepidation and a brooding sense of imposter syndrome that I joined them in early 2018. And it was clear that they had an exceptionally high caliber of practitioners, offering new opportunities to refine my skills, and I learned a lot, particularly from Alex Baxevanis and research oracle Olena Bulygina. Thanks to its embedded learning culture, it also offered me the chance to share some of my more eccentric hobbies and passions, so I further refined my talk on the evolution of information technology. Projects varied enormously, including;

• Research into consumer behaviour and the psychology of saving for the startup Wonderbill

• An international research project for Diligent

• A report on emerging technologies such as AR for News UK

• App design for Wetherby’s Private Bank

• Design and innovation for cruise booking Costco Travel

Then, after being there about a year, Webcredible founder Trenton Moss tearily announced that the company was being sold to Drupal developer Inviqa, which brought a whole new set of challenges and opportunities.

Inviqa

UX Principal / Experience Director (2019-2023)

At Inviqa I lead research and discovery projects focussed on technology and consumer behaviour for large international clients in a diverse range of industries and niches. These include luxury travel, catastrophic claims insurance, loyalty schemes, artificial intelligence, supermarket retail, and corporate entity management.

I specialise in synthesising different research threads into valuable insights and refining these into high-quality, easy-to-understand design deliverables. These vary, but are optimised to be the best medium for communicating whatever we’ve learned, be that video, animation, experience maps, service blueprints, or something new entirely. I believe in viewing problems holistically at a systems level, rather than looking at issues in isolation, and clear-talking avoidance of jargon and data-dumping clients. Volume does not equal value.

• Worked with a diverse array of clients including Visa, Starbucks, Savills, JLL, Aman Resorts, the Thoroughbred Breeders Association and legendary Miami hotel FontaineBleau.

• Oversaw numerous research and design projects to ensure commitment to excellence and rigour in thinking and design and clarity of communication to and between stakeholder groups.

• Planned, organised and facilitated a range of research and design projects using a variety of methods, (ethnographic, focus groups, field research, user testing) in industries as diverse as hospitality, retail, finance, aviation, real estate and cultural heritage.

• Produced low and high fidelity prototypes, animations, voice interfaces and other stimulus media for research purposes and to communicate concepts between stakeholders.

• Created a variety of design artefacts as an output of research including personas, service blueprints, experience maps and videos.

• Oversaw the production of design systems and documentation for design and development teams, and strategic documents and presentations for stakeholders to aid their internal goals and initiatives.

• Supported marketing and sales initiatives, producing showreels, social media content and having articles published online and in print.

• Ran a series of internal talks and workshops for staff on the topics such as generative AI, art history, storytelling, scriptwriting, video editing, and hackathons.