S/01
Art direction
One visual language across product, site and deck, so what a customer sees on Tuesday matches what they saw on Monday.
Hello. The name is
RobinVale
I art-direct and design for teams who already know what they are building, and need it to feel like one thing instead of forty.
Book a call
Two project slots open from September
Independent of the Year 2026
Art Direction & Interface
Art
Direction
210+ launches behind me
Working across nine time zones
Shipped with 30+ product teams
Brightsill Tessellate Coalfield Petrichor Saltmarsh Undergrove Meridian
Working together
Most of my work arrives as a half-finished thing somebody is quietly worried about.
Send me yours and I will tell you what I would do with it — honestly, and before there is any question of an invoice. If it is not a fit, I will name someone who is.
Send me the briefDesign is mostly deciding what to leave out, then defending that decision for six straight weeks.
15 Years independent
40+ Teams partnered
96% Would hire again
15 Years working independently, almost always with teams of under twenty people.
Background
Forty projects taught me the same lesson forty times.
I spent my twenties inside agencies making things look expensive. Somewhere around the fourth rebrand that never shipped, I started asking what the work was actually for. These days I take fewer clients, ask the awkward questions in week one, and stay until the thing is live.
- I read your support inbox before I open a design file.
- One senior person on the work from first call to launch — nothing gets passed down.
- If I think the project is the wrong project, you hear it before you pay me.
Engagements
Six ways to put me to work.
S/02
Interface design
Screens with the awkward states drawn too — half-empty, mid-upload, wrong password, four hundred rows and counting.
S/03
Design systems
Tokens, components and the written rules that stop the tenth screen drifting away from the first.
S/04
Identity
Marks, type and colour scoped for a team that has no design department to maintain any of it.
S/05
Site build
Fast, accessible front-end templates your marketing lead can edit without filing a ticket with engineering.
S/06
Second opinion
One week of full attention on a single funnel, flow or launch, ending in a written verdict you can act on.
How I work
Nothing exotic in the box.
Tools your team already has, files your team can open, and a handover that does not depend on me answering messages six months from now.
Art direction One visual language, held across every surface.
Typography Scales, pairings and a self-hosted font setup.
Motion Transitions with a reason, and a reduced-motion path.
Responsive Every layout checked from 320px through 1920px.
Front end Semantic markup and CSS your engineers can read.
Colour Palettes checked for contrast before they get pretty.
Systems Naming that survives the next rebrand.
Accessibility Contrast, focus order and keyboard paths, tested.
Selected work
Six projects, six different arguments.
2026 
Brightsill console
Rebuilt first-run — setup completion up 44% 2025
Tessellate identity
A mark, a type scale and rules that fit on four pages 2025 
Coalfield site
A marketing site rebuild the marketing team runs alone 2024
Petrichor reporting
Four spreadsheets folded down into one screen 2024 
Saltmarsh packaging
A print system that held through five product launches 2023
Undergrove app
Checkout cut from eleven taps down to fiveThe shape of it
Four stages, and you see something every Thursday.
The order is load-bearing. Each stage hands the next one something it cannot start without, which is how we avoid designing a screen for a decision nobody has made.
Stage 01
Listen
Two calls with you, four with your customers, plus every support ticket you are willing to share. I come back with the problem in one paragraph and you tell me where I got it wrong.
Week 1 Stage 02
Frame
Structure, flows and the hard trade-offs on paper before anything gets styled. You sign off a skeleton, which costs far less to change than a finished screen.
Week 2 Stage 03
Draw
Full-fidelity work with real copy and the ugly states included — loading, empty, error, name-far-too-long. Reviewed live, cameras on, every Thursday.
Weeks 3–5 Stage 04
Leave well
Component library, tokens, a written spec and a walkthrough with your engineers. A month of questions answered at no charge afterwards.
Week 6The shelf
Occasionally somebody notices.
Independent of the Year
Design Council annual, art direction category
WinnerInterface of the Month
For the Petrichor reporting rebuild
FeatureAccessibility Merit
Undergrove checkout, WCAG 2.2 AA audit passed
MeritRebrand of the Year
Regional Brand Awards, shortlisted from 410 entries
FinalistSpeaker, Type & Interface
Talk: designing the states nobody screenshots
TalkIn their words
What clients say once the invoice is paid.
We briefed three studios before this one. Robin spent the first week inside our support inbox rather than a design file, then showed us the two screens costing us signups. Setup completion moved forty-four points.
Priya Raghunathan Co-founder, Brightsill
The handover is the part that surprised me. Our two engineers built the entire marketing site from the component library in eight days and never once had to send a message about it.
Tomas Berger CTO, Coalfield
Fixed price, weekly demos, and in week two we were told to cut a feature rather than design it. That single conversation saved us a full quarter of engineering.
Elena Marchetti Head of Product, Petrichor
Notebook
Things I keep having to explain.
The empty screen is the one that decides
Most teams design the full dashboard and bolt on a shrug for day one. Here is how to invert that order without slowing the build.
Name your tokens for what they do
Call it brand-primary and you will be renaming four hundred references next year. A naming scheme that has survived three identity changes intact.
The eleven questions before a quote
Scope creep starts in the first email, not the third month. These questions surface the real project, and occasionally end the conversation early.
FAQ
Asked before nearly every project.
Not sure yet?
Send a paragraph about what is going wrong. If I am not right for it I will say so and name someone who is, usually the same day.
Write to meHow long does a project usually take?
A full product engagement runs six weeks end to end. An identity is three to four. A second opinion is one week. If your deadline is tighter than that, say so early and you will get an honest answer about whether it fits.
Is the price fixed?
Yes, wherever the scope is defined. One number, one payment schedule and a written list of what sits inside it. Anything outside becomes a conversation before work starts, never a surprise line on an invoice.
Can you work alongside our engineers?
That is the normal arrangement. I join your stand-ups, write specs in whatever format your team already uses, and stay reachable for a month after handover so questions get answered rather than guessed at.
What lands in my hands at the end?
Source files, a component library with every state documented, a token sheet, exported assets and a written spec covering behaviour and edge cases. Build engagements also include the front-end templates and a configured theme.
Do you take small pieces of work?
Sometimes. A single landing page, a pricing rewrite or a one-week review all fit comfortably. Anything larger tends to work better as a short sprint than as hours scattered across a quarter.
Who owns the work at the end?
You do, completely, once the final payment clears. Files transfer into your accounts rather than living in mine. I only ask permission to show the work publicly, and I will keep it private if you would rather.
Two project slots open from September
Have you got something that deserves doing properly?
Tell me what is broken, who it is breaking for, and what happens if it stays that way. That is enough for me to come back with a scope and a number.