Meet Rhys.
Forever curious
+ seeking forgiveness
over permission
How I got here…
I started in 2004 building Flash sites from a bedroom in Cardiff, which is a sentence that dates me precisely. Since then: agency years at Dare in Bristol and London, senior design at Dyson working on apps for physical machines, UX management at NatWest, and Head of Product Design at a medtech taking an AI diabetes platform through MHRA approval, where I led and mentored a team of twelve.
After that I went independent for four years, working at principal level across 31 products in six industries, including founding a start-up of my own. These days I am at Carwow, designing high-intent consumer journeys and AI-powered features across the UK, German and Spanish markets.
I keep choosing the messy, ambiguous, high-stakes problems.
The ones where the brief is a shrug and the answer has to survive regulators, engineers and real people having a bad day.
the maker bit
Somewhere along the way, designing stopped being enough. I wanted to ship the thing, not just describe it.
So now I build. Using AI-assisted development I take ideas past the prototype stage into working software.
The proof I am proudest of is lullogram, a sensory calm app for ADHD, autistic and overstimulated minds, live on the App Store and Google Play, designed, built and shipped solo. I have also built internal tools now used daily by product and engineering teams: a native haptics design tool, a usage-tracking menubar app, a local model powered closed captions tool and technical POCs that settle feasibility debates with running code instead of opinion.
Ten years ago this would have needed a team. Now it needs a designer who is willing to learn the tools and put the hours in. I did both.
I work as a force multiplier across design, product and engineering. Clear framing, shared artefacts, early validation. I favour systems over one-off solutions, evidence over opinion, and clarity over superfluous polish.
I was a Head of Design once, and I chose to step back to the work itself. Principal IC suits me: close to the craft, trusted with the ambiguous stuff, and measured by what ships.
A working thing beats a deck.
The fastest way to align a team is to put something real in their hands.
Evidence over opinion.
Strong views should always be held weakly (until the research says otherwise).
Constraints are the brief.
Regulation, legacy systems and technical reality are not obstacles to great design; they are the material.
Craft is a form of respect.
For the user, and for the engineers who have to build it. Utilising a solid design system.