Dylan Smith
Product designer in London via Toronto
I’m interested in the ways people work. I like identifying and solving challenges around workflow efficiency, productivity, and communication. Some of my favourite design challenges are inside the office, either others’ or my own; I thrive in a cross-functional Agile team and enjoy the process of continuous improvement.
I prefer whiteboards to design tools. I’m generally more interested in how things work than how they look. I’ve also been coding for over 20 years. I favour CSS and semantic markup, and I know enough JavaScript to bring ideas to life. As a result, I’m very comfortable moving from sketches to code and implementing the finishing touches to my own high design standards.
I’m a Certified Scrum Product Owner. By default, I optimise to create real value for both the user and the business. Colleagues and clients have identified me as a natural leader, and I’m confident in communication and collaboration with stakeholders across the org chart.
In previous lives I was a marketer, travelled with bands as a tour manager, went to school for business management, and worked more customer service and retail jobs than I can remember.
Currently
- Leading design and front end at Taxi for Email
- Running and building internal tools for an email industry community
- Using an iterative process to improve this website
Experience
Design Lead, Taxi for Email
November 2017 – presentProduct Designer, Contract
November 2016 – November 2017Web & Brand Designer, Freelance
September 2015 – November 2017Marketing Executive, Cyber-Duck
May 2014 – September 2015Selected Projects
Taxi for Email
Overhauling the front end of an enterprise SaaS product to be more modern and maintainable
More case studies soon
I’ll be publishing additional insights into my work at Taxi for Email on projects such as our WSYIWYG editor, customer onboarding, and two-factor authentication.
Better Placeholder
Placeholdit’s missing UI; an interface to quickly generate URL parameters for custom images
How to Target Email Clients
Filterable, crowdsourced database of email development techniques
Email Geeks Community
Landing page to promote and collect applications to the leading email marketing community
Sensitive Subjects
Playful take on solving an embarrassing problem faced by email marketers
Writing
- Case study: Redesigning and refactoring an enterprise web app How I turned around design and front end as the first product hire of an early stage startup.
- Weeknotes 2019-W19 On ice hockey, admitting you’re related to The Edge from U2, and saying yes.
- In defence of the company group chat
- Table stakes I asked designers at London tech companies: Does your company offer flexible working hours?
- Telling a company they suck won’t get you hired The ideal client values your discipline, knows what it costs, and is ready to buy.
- How to audit your LinkedIn connections
- To free or not to free I’ve been thinking about the apps I use and which ones I pay for. How do I decide who to support?
- Droning on
- Weeknotes 2019-W12 On Sensitive Subjects, conference proposals, and the guilt of taking sick days.
- Sensitive Subjects A few things I learned about programming while building a small web project.
- Weeknotes 2019-W11 “You shouldn’t just enquire. You should write, too.”
- The Revolutin’ will not be ostracised Everyone wants to talk about ethics in tech but not as much as they want free stickers.
- The ‘delete account’ button is the message
- How to host better meetings My seven golden rules to stop wasting everyone’s time.
- A look back at my 2018 resolutions How I did and how I feel about it.
- What should your hourly rate be as a freelancer? Take a simple formula, tweak it to work for you, and consider an alternative to selling time.
- How to write Rails comments that don’t appear in rendered HTML
- Southpaw grammar
- Don’t draw shitty Spider-Men Deadlines are the enemy of quality, but sometimes they’re unavoidable. So what do we do?
- Notes from product owner training A transcription of all of my notes from a two-day Certified Scrum Product Owner course.
- A Million Email Geeks on a Million Keyboards Video of my talk about the value of online communities for people working in niche industries and roles.
- All talk
- A certain perfect ratio
- First impressions of Google Contributor
- Right-click, copy link address
- Grid enough
- RSS boys we out here There’s a perfectly good Twitter alternative right here.
- Solving for (f) Every once in a while a designer writes an article that totally changes the way I think about something.
- Maintaining your sanity while using Slack A mostly complete guide to actually getting some work done
- Broken leg Three things you should do when preparing to speak at a tech event
- Banner year Recounting the highlights of a successful 2017
- A better placeholder image generator I built the user interface Placehold.it should have had all along.
- Reasons to pay it forward It was obvious from 10:00 on Monday that Reasons To wasn’t going to be like the conferences I normally attend.
- Show your hand It’s rare to see a designer cop to their influences, especially when those influences are their contemporaries.
- How to avoid getting ripped off by a client Eight steps you need to take on every single project to protect yourself as a freelancer
- Briefly on Briefly Thoughts on setting the stage for a successful project