Digital that people actually get.

Full circle. I studied at Liverpool John Moores University, then came back and single handedly redesigned and built the Students' Union's entire Freshers presence, the same Freshers I once walked into as a new student. Concept, design system, front end, copy, accessibility and launch, all mine.

The site runs on a book a flight metaphor. Freshers is framed as a journey you take off on with the Union. The hero is a departure lounge with a live flip countdown, the schedule is a departures board, tickets are boarding passes, and the help section is a Feeling lost wayfinding panel. One long scroll takes you from arrival to you are all set, built strictly to the Union's brand palette and display typeface with hand illustrated, scouse voiced brand stickers throughout.

It was built inside Union Cloud, a locked down student union CMS rather than a free hosting environment. No external stylesheet, so all the CSS is inline in a content block. The editor strips block content out of links, so interactive cards had to be re engineered as divs with inline text links. Wrapper IDs are auto generated, so every positioning hook had to hang off markup I did not author, using jQuery only with no build step. Making something that looks and behaves bespoke within all of that was the real work.

• A sticky flight status nav with a live mini countdown and JavaScript scroll spy.
• An animated departures board of every event across two weeks, genre tagged, each row a live ticket link to the Union's ticketing platform.
• A pixel built boarding pass component, main plus tear off stub, barcode and seat detail, with a baggage included freebies strip.
• The four elected officers as cabin crew in porthole frames, with a flypast banner and drifting clouds.
• An interactive, keyboard accessible LJMU bucket list with a live progress counter and a cleared for take off completion state.
• An embedded official Spotify playlist, a nightlife partner section and a four way contact grid.

Every animation is transform and opacity only and respects reduced motion preferences. I found and fixed four WCAG AA contrast failures, the brand blue was only 2.66 to 1 on white, so I introduced a darker text blue at around 5.7 to 1 for light backgrounds while keeping the brand blue on dark. Global focus outlines, ARIA roles and states on interactive components, a live region on the checklist counter, and a Core Web Vitals pass.

I built a supplement brand from nothing, entirely on my own and self funded from my working wage. Not a website project, a whole business. Every function that a company would normally split across departments, I did myself, and it reached real customers in one of the most competitive markets there is.

*Soft skills in action. Someone has to keep the talent hydrated.

The interesting part is the breadth. To get a food product onto Amazon and selling, I personally handled every one of these, learning each from scratch where I had to.

• Trademarking the brand and the legal groundwork behind it.
• Council approval, since selling food carries its own regulatory requirements.
• The certifications needed to list and sell on Amazon, arguably the biggest online marketplace in the world.
• Product design, from the formulation choices through to the packaging and label graphics.
• Market research to work out where a small independent could realistically compete.
• All the marketing, listing optimisation and the sales side.
• The tax and financial admin that sits under any real business.

Selling over 500 units in a market dominated by multi million pound companies is an achievement on its own. But the bigger thing it gave me is a first hand, end to end understanding of how a business is actually built and how each part of an organisation connects to the next. The honest constraint was capital, you need money to make money in this space and I was funding it from my own wage, but within those limits it worked and it taught me an enormous amount.

So alongside my specialist skills in the work I care most about, I also understand what the finance, legal, compliance, product and marketing functions each need, because I have personally sat in every one of those seats.

I am currently putting together the write up for my next project. Check back soon, or get in touch if you would like to hear about it directly.