YouTube and Netflix already have Japanese subtitles, and a learner can do very little with them. I wanted the dictionary inside the caption instead of in a second window, so I built it: furigana over the kanji, the English underneath, and a card behind every word you click.
I started a new job, noticed how much I was forgetting, and built the chief of staff I wanted. COSTA holds what I am working on, who matters and what is owed, and works from it every day. The next version is in progress.
A documentary history of a Victorian villa in Newton Abbot, once called Knowles Hill after the hill it stands on, traced through deeds, censuses, estate maps and newspaper archives. It marks where the record runs out as carefully as where it speaks.
Satirical notebooks that look like political nonfiction: a real-looking cover and title, blank pages inside. They are print-on-demand, so nothing sits in a warehouse. I built the shop, the order flow and the print pipeline myself.
The consultancy I run alongside my day job: fractional design leadership, product and UX audits, coaching for design leaders, and speaking.
A practice site for a creative counsellor in Newton Abbot. It is quiet and plainly written, and booking an introductory session is the first thing on the page.
Booking and a shop for art classes in South Devon and online, run by the same therapist-artist. It is brighter than the practice site and just as plainly written.
My own site, and the place I try things out. It is the place I try things out, and a 404 that prints is one of them.
A digitised copy of my home library, kept in Hardcover and shown as a green-screen terminal that boots up like an old library system. Search the collection, filter by what I have read, am reading or want to read, and read my reviews. There is a cover view if you would rather look at jackets.
Every album in my collection, over 1,400 of them, is a jewel case and not a thumbnail. Older records pick up a sepia cast and a yellowed case, the way they do on a shelf, and opening one slides it to the centre of its row. Underneath it is a Roon export, MusicBrainz, the Cover Art Archive, iTunes and Last.fm, with live listening stats and a permanently open case for whatever I have played most this week.
A guestbook set as a Japanese electronic word processor. It starts up with a model number and a tap to start, then lists the entries, each name written out in katakana. Search them, take a vocabulary quiz, or add your own.
My /now page, set as a desktop of windows: what I am working on, where I am, what I am reading and thinking about. The weather, my latest Bluesky post, the latest saved video and a status panel for the site sit alongside. What you see here is the live page.
Longer writing on design, software and the things I make. The newest note is a large tile and the rest sit in equal cells, divided by thin rules with a small diamond where they cross. Each tile is cut from its note: a typed letter, a parchment map, a terminal window. A terminal row searches the title, description and text of every note as you type, and the grid underneath never moves.
Six days on an ancient post road, Tokyo to Matsumoto via the Kiso Valley, as a photo essay. It reads down the page through the valley, the pass and the preserved towns, with captions in Japanese and English, the camera settings for each photograph, and a colophon of route, kit and coffee at the end.
A composite morning at the sea, assembled from years of looking at the South Devon coast, 2022 to 2026. Press play and the dawns run together on one clock. The sun and moon sit where they actually were, by altitude and compass bearing, and a tide chart along the bottom spans a full lunar cycle. The essay is being turned into an app, morning.video, which is in development.
Fifteen years of design leadership thinking, encoded as an MCP server so that an AI reasons from my own writing, frameworks and positions and not the averaged web. Thirteen named tools over a flat JSON file, and no conclusion yet. I use it to draft and to pressure-test ideas.
A newsletter of short essays on the work of design leadership: performance management, hiring and how organisations are shaped. Written for other design leaders, from inside the job and not about it.
No projects of that type yet.
