Charly joined our design team in January 2022, after a few weeks in the job we thought it'd be good to catch up and get to know a bit more about him.

Welcome, tell us a bit about yourself
‍I’m Charly, a junior designer with a background in anthropology, I live in south London with my girlfriend and our ginger cat. I’ve been working in design for the past 2 years starting off with digital design then moving to a more UX focused approach. When I’m not designing, I enjoy cooking for friends, getting out into nature either on my bicycle or on a hike across Dartmoor (preferably with a pub at the end of it). Recently been rediscovering the joys of live music whenever Covid restrictions have permitted.

What are you looking forward to about being part of the Loomery team?
‍Throughout the interview process and in the first few weeks of being part of the team it’s clear that Tim, Brett & Joni have such a depth of knowledge across design, strategy & product, I’m really looking forward to being part of such a passionate and experienced team and having the opportunity to learn from them.
As Loomery is still a relatively new company I’m hoping that I’ll be able to develop as a designer as the agency grows.  Also, Loomery has a strong emphasis on new and emerging technologies such as VR and blockchain so I’m looking forward to seeing how we’ll be able to integrate these into the product design process.

How have you found your first few weeks?
‍I’ve really enjoyed my first few weeks at Loomery. The team have been really welcoming and supportive, taking the time to get me up to speed on previous projects whilst also making me feel included in conversation about future ones. We met up in early January for a delayed Christmas meal and spent a day from our co-working space. Getting to meet the team in real life was really nice, as prior to that we'd only met via zoom and whilst virtual technology is brilliant, you can’t beat meeting up for some food and sharing a bottle of wine. I’m slowly getting involved in live projects and over the next coming weeks I’m looking forward to picking up momentum on these.

Have you been learning anything cool outside of your discipline?
I’m not sure how cool this is, but I’ve been getting really into gardening recently and have got plans to turn my small south London patch into a wildflower meadow.  Apart from gardening I’ve also finally jumped on the rock climbing bandwagon which has been fun and I’m looking forward to making it a bit more of a regular thing.

What’s your favourite tool or app most people haven’t heard of?
‍That’s quite a difficult question to answer as my favourite tools are pretty universal but I guess their popularity is a testament of how good they are. For anything design related I use Figma, from collaborative FigJam sessions, through to user flows, wireframes, high fidelity designs and prototypes. Another tool I’ve been using lots in the past year is Webflow, who have really opened up web design to a new audience of people by championing the low-code movement. I’m looking forward to seeing any new developments they create in the future whilst also continuing to push my learning on the platform. On the subject of low-code there's a platform called Adalo that allows you to create native apps that I’m going to take a look at soon.
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One less known non-design app I’m using quite a lot at the moment is called Radiooo. It's a great place to discover new music as it’s essentially a world map which allows you to listen to music created in any country in the world in any decade for the past 150 years. I really like how they’ve executed such an interesting concept so well and I’ve found some real hidden gems this way.

What’s the first website you built yourself?
‍The first website that I built myself was for an artist I know who wanted a place to sell his prints online. After doing some initial research into different options out there I decided to use the Shopify platform as they have a good CMS with built-in analytics so that it’d be easy for my client to manage the website himself once it was all built. I started off creating some designs in Figma and after a few feedback sessions with the client we managed to land on a layout that showcased his work in the best way.   With Shopify, there’s the option to use pre-made themes, however at that stage of my career I was also quite keen on understanding the underlying structures of how websites are built so I decided to code the site from scratch using HTML, CSS & JavaScript. I definitely learned a lot from this project and now have a strong appreciation of the skill and time that goes into front-end development. However, I think for any future projects of a similar nature I’ll definitely be sticking to low-code solutions or working with professional developers.

‍Recommend one podcast or book
‍I’ve been listening to a great podcast called ‘Creative Boom’. In each episode the host Katy Cowan interviews someone involved in the design world, talking about anything ranging from what it’s like to work at the agency ‘ustwo’ through to why university isn’t always the best option to get into the creative industries. I’ve just listened to the episode with Dave Smyth on the rise of surveillance capitalism and potential ways we can mitigate this as designers. One of the best books I read last year was ‘The Mermaid of Black Conch’ by Monique Roffey, I won’t give too much away in case you read it but if you’re a fan of magical realism, the 1970’s & the Caribbean then I’d definitely recommend it!

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