Hi, I’m Philip. I hunt down the moment people give up.

I’ve found that moment in a bank account you open by dialling a code on a basic phone. In a telehealth portal where someone just wants to see a doctor. In a precious metals platform that needed to feel like an open door, not a vault.

But fixing the flow is only half of it. People decide how they feel about something long before they tap a button. So I also build the first impression: the brand, the type, the colour, the logo that has to work on a billboard and a favicon. I started as an art director, and I never really stopped. I still care far too much about kerning.

I studied maths. Then I found design, which turned out to be maths with feelings.

I sketch before I polish. I ask “why” more than is polite. I’d rather show you something rough on Tuesday than something perfect next month.

By day, I work at HMRC. Yes, really. Every week I watch people wrestle with systems that were never built with them in mind, and every week I take notes. Best design school I never enrolled in.

By night (and early mornings, and the odd lunch break), I’m:

• lead designer at Glyphra
• one half of Nimé Studios, photographing and filming for West African families across the UK
• the person my church calls when something needs to look good
• design adviser to TFN, a news startup across the Atlantic
• still answering the phone for DisruptDNA and the Nigeria Network of NGOs, because some collaborations don’t end, they just evolve

When nobody’s paying me, I walk around with a camera. Street photography is where I practise seeing: light hitting a wall at the wrong angle, a stranger mid-laugh, a shopfront nobody’s looked at properly in years. Half my design instincts come from those walks.

When I’m off the clock (and the camera’s off), I’m losing at chess (gracefully), chasing a sub-four marathon (less gracefully), or “just looking” at cars. I am never just looking.