Hi, I’m Stepham. I’m a designer and frontend engineer with over 8 years of experience across graphic design, interface design and web engineering.
From vision to details and back again, my job is to build beautifully designed hypertext interfaces that work in the blink of an eye, creating the most valued currency—trust.
An mascot, logo designed by my girlfriend, Ayşegül, an Turkey talent Artist.
A few career highlights:
- I worked as a frontend engineer & designer at Vana, a San Francisco-based AI/crypto start-up for a few years, 2022 to 2024.
- I built Cleared from initial commit through to its sale in 2022. I assembled and lead its engineering team from 2019 to 2022.
- I ran my own remote freelance agency 2015 to 2022. I’ve worked remotely for a decade now.
- In the 00s, I worked as a brand designer at Saatchi & Saatchi, London and George Patterson Bates, Brisbane.
- You can still find my turn-of-the-century branding work in Australian supermarkets.
For a complete work history, please read my CV.
As a designer, I’ve been working across branding and graphic design since 1999 and user interface (UI) design since 2004. When applied to creating for the internet, I consider all these facets crucial to designing the user’s experience (UX).
As a frontend engineer, I’m fluid with React and Typescript, and I’ve used Vue and Svelte in the past. My go-to frameworks are Next, Remix and TanStack Router. HTML and CSS are givens. I use tools like TanStack Query and Server Components to bridge the network and database layers. I’m particularly interested in BaaS designed for frontend developers, especially those offering real-time sync and local-first systems.
Some people might call this mix of skills a “design engineer”, others a “full-stack designer”. Either way, I’m competent as a designer or engineer and I love making design real in code.
The value of good design is only realised if you have an engineer capable of discerning the details in code (or if you’re lucky, they’re one and the same). Jim Nielsen
A decade as graphic designer and a decade as frontend engineer gives me unique agency: I use code as a design tool to get as close as possible to the nitty gritty of the medium. Being able to design and code simply creates a much faster feedback loop.
Neither code nor design is the point. Materialising ideas is. As such, I think there is no substitute for the journey of forming personal taste by paying attention to the world and making ideas real.
Knowing the tempo of work is underrated. Are we testing a hypothesis? Running downhill towards a feature release? Nailing a customer experience flow? I keep a tempo in mind at all times.
Lastly, I believe that teamwork scenius is secret in plain sight. Shared intuitions and mutual at-handedness grease the wheels for speed as well as tuning orientations. As such, I work with people first. Good ideas and working systems naturally follow.
I collect music of all kinds and used to run multiple vinyl record labels.
I read books and watch films voraciously; Gerald Murnane’s “Border Districts” or Jonathon Glazer’s “Under The Skin” are current favourites. My favourite artist is either Agnes Martin or Joseph Cornell.
I’ve lived in 3 countries and 8 cities. Home is now tropical Cairns, Australia with my wife and children.