Mike graduates with an honours degree in "Graphic Design & Visual Communication", specialising in "Multi-Media" at "Ravenbourne College of Design & Communication", now known as "Ravenbourne University London"
Mike's quote of the day...
"The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand."Mike graduates with an honours degree in "Graphic Design & Visual Communication", specialising in "Multi-Media" at "Ravenbourne College of Design & Communication", now known as "Ravenbourne University London"
Mike starts his career working agency-side designing websites for global brands such as Guinness, Coca Cola, Barclays, Sainsburys and many others. This is where he also starts learning HTML, JavaScript and CSS
Mike goes client-side, managing the Digital Media Department within creative services, a small team of .Net devs & Designers. This was a hands on role and he got involved in the design and front-end development on the Pfizer Intranet
Mike spent a year at Barclays working on a trading platform used by internal teams. He handled both UX and frontend development, creating Axure prototypes and building UI components to support trade execution workflows and market data interaction.
Mike starts a contract at BBC Worldwide designing and developing the BBC Motion Gallery website, the new TopGear website and interactive sales presentation for Topgear TV merchandise
Mike starts a contract with Turner Broadcasting Inc, designing the Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Boomerang and CNN websites. This contract was back in the days of Adobe Flash and a large part of the role was to create and animate various CN online gaming portals
Mike joins IBM’s to work on their cloud-based SaaS products. He collaborates with product managers and engineers to improve usability and accessibility, conducting usability testing to refine workflows and optimize the overall user experience.
Mike joins an exciting greenfield project at Universal Music, designing and developing a suite of applications to manage the production and delivery of music out to digital streaming services such as Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, Spotify and many others
Mike's currently working at Anglo American on a rolling contract. He's designing and developing data-rich trading websites for Anglo clients in Angluar and React. He's overseeing 100+ .Net developers whilst building a fully fledged Javascript component library for Anglo American's comprehensive catalogue of customer onboarding and commodity
trading applications
Hi...
I’m Michael King of PixelHeads Limited
A Senior UX/UI Consultant/Designer and Front-End Developer.
I take projects from inception through to delivery
I’m Mike King of PixelHeads Limited
A Senior UX/UI Consultant/Designer and
Angular/React Front-End Developer.
About
Who's Mike?
Mike has extensive experience in UX, Visual Design and FE Development, working more recently in AngularJS and ReactJS. He comes from both a creative and technical background and in the past has been a practitioner in Art, Sculpture, Music, Electrical Engineering and Electronics. His focus over the past 15 years has been Software design and development.
Specialities
- Visual Design – natural ability to create compelling visual designs quickly
- UX Design – wireframes / mock-ups / user-journey’s/ personas / user-stories
- Experienced typographer with a passion for colour, composition, and hierarchy
- High-level presentation experience to senior stake holders
- Design leadership experience and mentoring / managing small teams
Clients past and present
Soon after graduation Mike worked agency-side for global brands such as Guinness, Toshiba, Sainsburys, Barclays, Mars and Coca Cola to name a few. His job was to conceptualise and design brand and marketing campaigns, websites and so on. Following this he moved client-side, initially working for Pfizer on their global Intranet of over 200 websites, then later took on contracts at Discovery Channel, BBC, Turner Broadcasting, Universal Music and currently Anglo American building heavy data-driven financial trading applications for their huge client portfolio.
Why hire Mike?
As mentioned, Mike has both the design experience and the front-end knowledge. This gives him the confidence and knowhow to produce a product from the ground up. Though some clients prefer to separate out roles on a project, a Designer focusing solely on UX or a Developer focusing solely on UI, in his experience there tends to be a disconnect between the final design and the implementation. Mike not only bridges this common gap, he also takes leadership in the final build.
USER RESEARCH
PERSONAS, USER STORIES,
WIREFRAMES, TESTING
VISUAL DESIGN
WEB & BRAND DESIGN,
TYPOGRAPHY
FRONT-END DEVELOPMENT
MODERN FRAMEWORKS,
RESTFUL API’S
Approach
Design Sprints
In a concentrated and highly focussed time period, cross-disciplinary teams can rapidly understand, define, prototype and validate a design solution. Design sprints are a great way to get full team buy-in and find answers to complex problems.
Stakeholder Interviews
Understanding the why is at the core of being able to develop the how. Stakeholders often have invaluable experience of the users, their behaviours and motivations can provide excellent context when developing a UX solution.
Customer Journey Mapping
A Customer Journey map is a visual representation of the overall story of a customer's relationship with your company, product or service. The story highlights the intersections between their expectations and your offering. This is very useful in trying to understand how the user feels and reacts to different interactions and how they can be optimised for a better user experience.
User Testing
Having users involved early and often yields the greatest results. Observing users attempting to complete tasks with a prototype of your product can help you identify usability problems as early as possible, so they can be fixed before the design is implemented.
Storyboarding
Storyboarding is a useful human centred design approach. Storyboards help us explore and predict the user’s experience with a product. We can use them to think about the context of use, what users are feeling and looking for at each stage and how we can best meet their needs. Visualising the user journey in this way can also help us to build a strong narrative that engages and delights users.
Wireframing
Wireframes are extremely useful to help define the user flow and hierarchy of information on the screen. Removing all visual design and brand elements helps us to focus on the functionality and principles of the journey. They are a visual way to communicate abstract ideas to colleagues, stakeholders and users in order to help elaborate the UX design.
Design Patterns
Keeping abreast of modern design patterns and trends is an absolute must when desiging any product. As designers, we cannot live in a vacuum and ignore the world around us. I believe great design leads to great experiences and enriches our lives. Everything is designed and the things we love the most are the things that are designed well.
Typography
Many people never really consider typography. They may not always understand the psychological effect it has in relation to conveying a message. Good typography invites a reader to actually read a text. Designers must take great care in considering the typographical approach when designing a peice of work and how fonts can help solidify a given brand.
Modern Frameswork
Modern Framesworks such as React, Angular and Aurelia have vastly improved the entire experience of developing cutting edge software that deliver immediate feedback for users. Restful API's have enhanced the user experience and have vastly improved both development efficiency and code maintainability.
Front-End Development
On projects with limited resources, designers are sometimes expected to have mastered front-end development. Though not all clients require this and many have the available funds to split teams into their specialist areas, having solid foundations in this area will not only vastly speed up delivery on a given project, but also help bridge the gap between the visual side (prototyping) and the back-end (architecture).
Projects
Contact
Interested in collaborating or need a Senior UX/UI Designer/Front-end Developer for your next project? Feel free to reach out, I'd love to hear from you!