DECLAN WEBSTER
Born 1990. Based in Sheffield.
I’m a passionate creative with an eye for detail, a love of design and a tendency to get far too interested in how things work.
I’ve spent more than eleven years working in software, seven of those in product design, growing from a two-person team at a small Sheffield company to leading and working within international design teams on complex products used across a range of industries.
What I love about UX is that it sits somewhere between creativity, problem solving and understanding people. I enjoy taking complicated systems, awkward workflows and difficult problems and finding ways to make them feel clear, intuitive and genuinely useful. I’m particularly passionate about usability and accessibility, and I’m always interested in new tools and technologies that can help me explore ideas, prototype faster and approach problems in different ways.
I’ve worked both independently and as part of wider teams, collaborating across design, product, engineering and the broader business to turn rough ideas, user needs and strategic goals into things people can actually use and hopefully feel good about using.
By night I fight crime I tend to keep myself busy with an ever-growing list of creative interests: drawing, model painting, music production, videography, video editing, 3D modelling, writing and, more recently, learning to design and build my own video games.
That tendency to jump between disciplines has been there for a long time. I became interested in filmmaking when I was young, but didn’t properly pick up a video camera until I realised I was much better at filming my friends BMXing and skateboarding than I was at doing either myself.
That eventually led me to study Film and Video Production at university and start, and later close, a video production company called Moose Lorals. We worked on music videos, live events, the occasional wedding and briefly dipped our toes into YouTube. The water was cold and we were awful.
Music videos in particular have always been a huge source of inspiration for me. The work of directors like Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, Lance Bangs and Jonathan Glazer helped shape the way I think about ideas, visuals and storytelling, and that influence still finds its way into the things I design and make today.
Whether I’m working on a product, a game, a piece of music or something visual, the bit I enjoy most is taking an idea that feels messy or uncertain and figuring out how to make it work.
