Writing

Journal

21 February 202612 min read

Design Systems Are Consuming the World (And That's Fine)

Whatever your relationship with design systems, here's the uncomfortable truth: they've gone from a nice organisational bonus to an absolute necessity. And if your team is still building products without one, you're essentially assembling IKEA furniture without the instructions. Except the instructions are also in Swedish. And someone's already lost three of the screws.

Read Article
21 February 20268 min read

The UX of Video Games: What Product Designers Should Be Stealing

Product designers love to talk about onboarding flows, progressive disclosure, feedback loops, and user engagement. We attend conferences about it. We read books about it. We create elaborate Figma files documenting it. And yet, video games have been doing all of this, often brilliantly, since before most of us had email addresses. The games industry has been running the world's largest UX experiment for over forty years, and most product designers are barely paying attention.

Read Article
29 January 202614 min read

Raising the Dead: Bringing a long fallen platform back to life

A gaming platform that cost £5,000/month fell under its own weight. Years later, it's been rebuilt from scratch as vgdb.co, with AI assistance and a radically simpler approach. This is a resurrection story.

Read Article
18 January 202611 min read

The AI Gutenberg moment: When everyone becomes a digital creator

AI is doing to software what the printing press did to scribes. Creation is becoming cheap, fast, and accessible to everyone. The challenge isn’t building products anymore—it’s making ones that aren’t bland, copyable, or forgettable.

Read Article
12 June 202511 min read

The AI Gold Rush: Could this be the next .com boom?

Something remarkable is happening across the world right now. People who have never written a line of code—accountants, teachers, small business owners, freelancers—are able to build an app. Not learning to build one. Not taking a coding bootcamp. Just... building one. With AI.

Read Article