Independent of the Year
Design Council annual, art direction category
WinnerAbout
Fifteen years, and the same lesson keeps turning up.
Robin Vale is an independent art director and interface designer. Fewer clients, harder questions in week one, and a handover that does not quietly depend on one person.
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.
Design 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
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.
The 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.
Interface 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
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.