Description

Hi, I'm James, an experienced designer and front-end developer with a love of strong typography, clean layouts, and impactful design choices. I believe that great design masks complexity allowing users to get on with the task at hand. I have experience in responsive web, app design and service design. I'm a stickler for detail and order so love to bring that in to any role I take on, I also love to code so prototyping can be done in great detail. I've worked as Head of Digital Design at one of London's most unique department stores helping drive their digital success and have experience on lots of web design projects over more than 15 years, which all feeds in to my well rounded approach to design and design thinking. I work in Figma and/or Adobe XD, I have sound knowledge of most of Adobe Creative Suite as well 'Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects'. For dev work I use Visual Studio Code, writing HTML, JS and CSS. I am familiar with JIRA, github and the general development lifecycle. Most importantly I have a strong eye for great design and won't settle until things are just right. I believe that design systems and UI Kits that are well organised can really elevate the working environment for product design and also really aid in the end to end product development lifecycle.

Languages

English
Native or bilingual

Workplace preferences

Remote only

Primarily works remotely

Condé Nast
Lead Product Designer
PRESS AND MEDIA
June 2023 - May 2024 (11 months)
As the lead digital product designer I helped deliver and launch a new software for the Mass Media company Condé Nast. The problem I was solving was to create a single source of truth for content editorial planning activities where teams across Condé Nast could plan magazine editions and online content factoring in commissioning, payments and rights management of the work delivered for Condé Nast. The key goals of the design and build were; to unify and standardise the editorial planning process, bringing global teams closer into one app increasing visibility and awareness of content being planned.

— UXR, discovery and collaboration to build a picture of the real needs for the software
— Entire set of responsive designs and prototypes for the content planning software
— Front-end development support for the execution of the user experience
User Experience Design User Interface Design Front-End development
Playground Studio
Lead Product Designer
DIGITAL AND IT
February 2023 - April 2024 (1 year and 3 months)
Delivery of 2 complete site designs for a global property company in the lifestyle arena. I worked closely with key stakeholders and build partners to handover a well documented and elegant set of responsive site designs for the entire flows of the 2 sites. This includes full interactive and animated prototypes of the user flows.

- 2 Entire responsive site designs
- Interactive and animated prototypes
- A micro design system and UI Kit
User Interface Design User Experience Design Design Systems
James Finch / Press Studio
Digital Product Designer / Director
DIGITAL AND IT
January 2023 - Today (3 years and 5 months)
London, England, United Kingdom
Recent work for Press Studio: Internal Software design for Condé Nast. Web design services for The Playground Studio. App design for fintech startup Compound.