Glasgow, UK

I like understanding how things work. That is why I went into design.

I see patterns, and I see ways to improve the system underneath them. That was true long before it was a job.

Declan Malone
The short version

Fine art photography taught me to see. Full-stack taught me what a design actually costs.

I studied Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art, then went and learned to build software at CodeClan. I spent a year as an automation engineer writing test frameworks before moving into design proper — which is an odd route, and the most useful thing about me.

Since then: navigation and conversion work at Toolstop, KYC and onboarding tooling at J.P. Morgan, a margin analytics platform at OpenGamma, and now DFYNE — where I was the first digital hire, built the UX practice from nothing, and hired the ten people who run it.

DFYNEJ.P. MorganOpenGammaToolstop
How I work
01

I would rather be wrong in week one

On Cardconomy, one conversation with a shop owner took apart a strategy three weeks of desk research had left standing. I checked all three of his claims against sources, and rebuilt around what survived. Most of what I believe about a problem is provisional until something disagrees with me.

02

A rule in a document survives a fortnight

Written down, "screens are inset 16px" lasts until the first busy week. Owned by a component, a screen physically cannot get it half-right. The same lesson turned up on Athlete Styles from the other direction: I left the curation rules in a doc, and the curation drifted.

03

Measure, don't reason from a description

Two attempts at a spacing bug from a verbal description both missed. Rendering the two implementations side by side and reading the computed values found it in one pass. It is now the first thing I do when two things disagree.

04

Name the cost, not just the call

Every decision in these case studies carries what it gave up. Anyone can list what they built; naming what it cost is the part that makes a decision reviewable rather than promotional.

Off the clock

Everything I do for fun is a system with a rabbit hole underneath it.

Climbing

Climbing

A problem with exactly one correct sequence and no way to argue with it.

Camping

Camping

Constraints you cannot design your way out of. Very clarifying.

Foraging

Foraging

Identification under uncertainty, where being roughly right is not good enough.

Coffee

Coffee

A setup that has got well out of hand. Six variables, one cup, endless iteration.

Netsuke

Netsuke

Miniature carvings where every millimetre is decided. The purest design objects I own.

One Piece TCG

One Piece TCG

A market, a ruleset and a collection problem at once — which is why I built MyTCG.

Manga

Manga

I have read Berserk more times than is defensible. Composition lessons, mostly.

Trees

Trees

Slow systems. Good for the pace at which I would otherwise work.

The unusual bit

I ship the code as well as the design.

At DFYNE I own the Liquid implementation as well as the design, so features get scoped to what the platform can actually do and briefed to developers in their own terms rather than stalling at handover. MyTCG and Cardconomy I built outright — Next.js, TypeScript, Postgres.

The value is not that I can write the code. It is that I have never handed over a design I could not cost — and that when a build and a design disagree, I can go and read why instead of describing the difference to someone else.

Design

Figma, design systems and tokens, IA, interaction design, prototyping

Research

Interviews, usability testing, A/B testing, Microsoft Clarity, GA4, journey mapping

Build

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Liquid, Tailwind, Git

Domains

Ecommerce (Shopify Plus), wealth management, margin analytics, prime brokerage, B2B SaaS

Open to senior
and lead roles.

declanamalone@gmail.com