Design Club

For the past 2 years, I — along with two co-founders — have organised and hosted a series of events called Design Club. As we say on the website:

The idea came from wanting to have an honest conversation about where our rapidly evolving industry was going. Events would always be free, inclusive, and a place to get the community together (with an open bar).

Speakers are encouraged to share their unique perspective, rather than present case studies of past projects. We’ve had everyone from startup founders to fashion designers, from VCs to government employees. We’ve had a talk on job sharing for professionals, and we’ve had Lego’s Head of UX talk about making bricks digital.

To date every event has sold out in under 30 minutes, with our most recent taking less than 10.

Along with my two co-founders, I’ve been responsible for finding and booking venues, sourcing sponsors, and curating and arranging speakers.

Alongside this, I created the visual identity, and designed and built the website using Jekyll.

After our first few events, it became clear that there was an opportunity: our speakers were finding it hard to hire great designers, and our audience were some of the most engaged and curious in the country. In response to this I decided to build a jobs board, but before committing too much I wanted to ensure it would actually be useful.

I surveyed the audience, focusing on what made them want to work for a company, and found a small set of questions consistently came up. As a result I designed the board to feature short interviews with each company, as well as transparent salary information for the role.

Since launching it’s been used by small startups all the way through to giants like Deliveroo. See you at the next event!