About

In 2009, two important things happened. First, I completed my honors year studying 20th-century sans-serif typography. Second, I founded my first business.

I thought I would spend my career as a type designer, like the Swiss designers I had spent years studying.

But in April of that year, I wondered how I could use my design degree to help other people, not just design packaging to sell more widgets.

So, some friends and I launched Positive Posters. The idea was pretty simple: we asked graphic designers to upload a poster to our website that advertised an issue they cared about. We promised to have an exhibition of the posters later in the year.

To our surprise, 350 people designed and submitted posters. They came from 52 countries. We were shocked.

We held an exhibition of the best 30 and then called it a year.

However, the response from both the designers and the people who came to our gallery and website was so strong that we decided to do it again the following year.

This initiative continued to grow and grow. It made no money, so I took part-time jobs to continue working on it.

In our fourth year, Yoko Ono replied to a letter I’d sent her, telling her about what we were doing. She agreed to tweet about us to her then 1 million followers.

Our website crashed.

We started getting over 1 million page views a month.I had designed the website in Illustrator, and it was built on WordPress. I’d never heard of ‘user experience design’.

Each day I would wake up to customer service emails in my inbox saying something like, “I can’t find the login button.”

Making the button easier to find would be my task for that day. That continued for a long time.

Yoko’s tweet sent us so much traffic that it bankrupted our tiny venture. Our hosting bill was $50k for the year with close to zero revenue.

To pay the bill, I started a design conference called Sex, Drugs & Helvetica. It worked, and I continued to run the conference for five years.

In the meantime, people started asking me how to design websites and, after the iPhone came out, apps.

So, I started a life of freelance product design work, which eventually led me to IDEO when I was about 25 years old.

After that, I came back to Australia and set up my own design agency called Joan.

We did research, prototyping, design, and development for startups all the way through to listed companies.

We had a desire to switch our revenue from ‘clients to customers,’ so we went looking for a problem to solve and a product to build.

That journey led us to Tiller, a hardware and software product to help small businesses improve their time tracking.

It took us nearly five years to build and ship it. It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and was by far the most complex thing I’ve ever worked on.

We did everything in-house: brand, packaging, software, hardware, go-to-market, fundraising, firmware, etc.

Tiller shipped to over 3,000 people in 2019, and in 2020 (just before COVID hit), I decided I was tired and needed a break from my decade-long journey into design, product, and company building.

Since then, I’ve been consulting for various startups and taking on freelance projects when there is a good fit.

If you want to hear more or talk product, please reach out.