Five to inspire with Shaun Tollerton
Product Designer @ ustwo
Who are you?
I grew up in South London and from early on I realized that my strengths lied in the visual arts and digital media. That eventually led me to obtain a degree in Graphic Design New Media, which after graduating in 2008 I began my career in digital advertising. After a few years of that I realized that I wanted to create experiences that people actually wanted to use and engage with, so in 2011 I joined ustwo, a digital product and service design studio based in Shoreditch. They were creating fun products of their own as well as partnering with some of the worlds leading brands. 3 amazing years later I took an exciting opportunity to move to New York City to help expand ustwo into the U.S. which is where I remain today.
What’s a typical day in Shaun's life like?
If the weather’s good I love to cycle to work via Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridge which is always fun! Once at work I’ll catch up on emails and Slack over coffee and then my team will have stand-up. We’ll discuss what we were able to accomplish the previous day and what we plan to do today, all whilst reviewing the team Trello board. Right after that we’ll have a design review to go over new work. After lunch I like to put on a lengthy techno mix and focus on the tasks I’d committed to at stand-up. That typically involves sketching out an idea or concept, moving to Sketch to explore visual design and then to Marvel or Origami to prototype. At the end of each week we’ll have a video call with our client team to go through our progress and get any feedback.
ustwo in general is a crazy and fun place to work. Lots of amazing people working on a broad range of exciting projects. This video gives some insight into what life inside ustwo is like:
How would you define good design?
Design should be able to successfully balance user needs with business objectives.
From an agency perspective, good design stems from a well conceived brief, the thinking behind every decision has been well considered, and validated, and is executed with careful attention to detail.
I also just really dig this quote by John Maeda:
Share something you’d really like to do — but haven’t done yet. What’s keeping you from doing it?
It’s cliché I know, but I looove to travel. There’s just so much to see and be inspired by out there. Life commitments such as a full time job make it tricky. There are work and travel programs out there like Remote Year that allow you to keep your current job and travel the world, so maybe that’s an idea. Alternatively a shift in career could be an option. Become a travel photographer?! I don’t know. Maybe I just need to figure out my 4-hour work week.
How do you imagine your life as a designer 10 years from now will be?
The actual act of implementing user interfaces is going to become a lot more efficient as more companies and brands adopt Design Language Systems for their digital products and I think we’ll see more design tools functioning like React-sketchapp that are designed to make it easier to implement screens from those Design Language Systems. That means I imagine myself moving away from the actual implementation of UI and more on what the overall user experience should be and how the principles of a brand manifest themselves into those experiences.
All of that assumes websites and apps will still be the primary way to interface with a service, but we’re already seeing a future where voice, AR, VR and others will play a more prominent role, so I think it’s essential to be constantly hungry for these new shifts and paradigms.
People and/or designers that inspire you? (personally and professionally)
Cap Watkins for constantly sharing his design management advice.
Elon Musk for his ability to operate across a range of businesses using first principle thinking.
Helen Tran for her writing on product design and management.
John Maeda for his design philosophy.
Kelsey Hunter for her relentless work in product design.
Where can we find Shaun Tollerton?
You can check out my shots on Dribbble, view my mix of overly-crafted photography and throw-away Stories on Instagram, read my thoughts on Medium, see my commentary on the world of product design on Twitter and listen to my unique taste in techno music on SoundCloud.
