Designing meaningful experiences for twenty years
Stephen West is a Product Designer, Art Director and occasional Barista from London. After completing his Retail Design degrees, he soon realised designing interactive environments, and interfaces would is the future.
He started his career working as a website designer in the early days of the web. His career has taken him from a humble designer to a Senior Digital Art Director and has worked at Publicis Dialog, Chemistry and TMW. Later he had the honour to be hired as Digital Design Director at Embrace where he worked on clients such as Surry Police, BMY Mellon and JP Morgan. Where he honed his user experience skills, creating complex wireframes, design systems and prototypes.
He has regularly freelanced over this career and has often been tempted to take permanent roles and has done so while freelancing at Elevate Credit he was offered the position of Design Manager. During his time there, he managed and structured the design team around business needs, implemented design processes and created a design system for the main product.
Stephen's passion extends beyond design, He has an enthusiasm for technology and science. Principally about the human journey and how technology is transforming it. The ability to take on board new technologies to create richer experiences is one of his key strengths.
A self-confessed food connoisseur, in 2018 he put into motion a goal to set up a coffee business and now runs a mobile Coffee Sevice form a converted Jeep which he operates at Wedding, Festivals, Exhibitions & Events. Stephen plans to grow Hixon House Coffee into a franchise and deliver the same level of design success he has had over the last 20 years.
Projects
- Sunny loansElevate Credit International is a non-prime lender providing options for those who find themselves excluded from using mainstream credit providers. Building products designed to meet customers’ immediate financial needs and helping them on the way to build a better financial future. The Sunny product and brand were launched in 2013. Their main objective is to provide fair and flexible short-term and installment loans by utilising industry-leading technologies and risk analytics focused on the n
Work history
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Design Manager - ProductElevate Credit International
- London, United KingdomFull Time
While at Elevate, I created and installed a visual design system, reducing the UX debt by 60%-70% and substantially improving the overall performance of the product. This process involved liaising with developers, QA testers, product owners and stakeholders.
As the Design Manager, I restructured the team to create a more user-centric experience by bringing on board a UX designer and starting an optimisation program to seek out opportunities to improve the product performance further.
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Senior UI DesignerWestie
- London, United KingdomFreelance
I was appointed to focus on designing user interfaces and primarily tasked to render wireframes into components, design systems, and creating design guides. In this period of freelancing, I worked with two startups, Olivine Life, an online Interior Design service, and Vidados was an activity holiday marketplace. I have also worked with established companies like Hitachi technology consulting and MarketOne International, a demand generation agency.
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Skills
- UI Design
- Art Direction
- Creative Direction
- Digital Design
- Branding
- Web Design
- Identity Design
- Advertising
- Wireframe Creation
- Digital Prototyping
Education
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Bachelors Degree BA (hons) Retail Design and Managementlondon college of printing & distributive trades
- London, United Kingdom