A brand system the marketing team can use without me
Fera’s website is 53 components and 13 page templates, built in Figma with Only and specified component by component into Sanity. Once that existed, the interesting question wasn’t how to design more pages. It was how to let people who aren’t designers make pages that are already right.
So I audited the lot. Every component, every template, line lengths and breakpoint behaviour across desktop, tablet and mobile, and I derived the real word ceilings from the placeholder copy rather than guessing them. Then I mapped the Figma component names onto the Sanity schema so they match, added the SEO logic and the new tone of voice, and packaged all of it as an installable skill.
You paste in ten sprawling legacy pages about soil health, half of it HTML you can’t lift cleanly, plus a brief. It returns one page of CMS-ready copy that fits.
The part I care about is what it can’t do. It can’t produce something the system won’t build, because the ceilings come from the components and the field names come from the schema. It doesn’t design and it doesn’t invent findings. The scientist who owns the data still reads every page and signs it off before it goes live, which is not a nice-to-have in a business whose output ends up in front of regulators.
A page went from about a day of writing and revision to about an hour of building.
None of that works without the schema. Build the tool first and you get plausible copy that then doesn’t fit anything, which is worse than no tool at all, because now somebody has to unpick it.
Screenshot space — system schema
A tone of voice tool for people who don’t write for a living
Same idea, smaller. Fera’s new tone of voice guidelines are good and nobody reads guidelines. So I encoded them, and now a scientist writing a summary, or a colleague whose first language isn’t English, can get something that sounds like Fera without reading a 40-page PDF first. It doesn’t write for them. It tells them what’s off.
Screenshot space — tone of voice tool
A job board that fills itself overnight
Jobs in Cycling is mine - I designed it, built it in Webflow, structured the CMS and run it. It’s a job board for the bike trade, which is an industry where good roles have always been passed round by word of mouth and then never heard about again.
It runs a pipeline every night. It reads the careers pages of employers I’ve approved, finds roles that weren’t there yesterday, writes them into the CMS in the house format with the right category and contract type, and leaves them as drafts. On a Friday it emails me the queue. I reply with approvals and corrections, and on Sunday evening the approved ones go live and the closed ones get retired.
There are two rules it can’t break. It only takes listings from an employer’s own site, never from another job board, because their listings are their business and republishing them reworded is just free-riding. And it never invents a salary. If the employer hasn’t published one the listing says “not stated”, every time, because the whole point of the board is that you can see what a job pays before you spend an evening applying.
Nothing publishes without me. The automation does the finding and the formatting. The judgement is still a person, and it should be.
Screenshot space — jobs pipeline
A certification platform you can check from a shelf
Certified by Fera is a scientific certification scheme for food and drink. The question was how somebody standing in a shop in Japan checks that the honey in their hand is what the label says, on their phone, in the time it takes to pick the jar up.
There’s a mark and a label lockup, but the part doing the work is a lookup portal I designed and built on Webflow, Airtable and Make: unique codes per item and per batch, resolving to the actual lab results for that product. Total phenolic content, non-peroxide activity, glycaemic index. One scan away from the packaging.
A mark asks you to trust something. The database is the bit that earns it.
Screenshot space — certification portal
The unglamorous half
I also rebuilt Fera’s analytics and consent from nothing across two domains - GA4, Google Tag Manager, consent mode, the cookie banner itself, which is nobody’s idea of design work and which I wrote because it needed writing. I mapped over 400 redirects when the estate went from 1,000-odd pages to around 200. This sort of thing is most of what AI is actually good for in my job: the tedious, structured, high-volume work that used to mean either a fortnight or a contractor.
What I won’t do with it
I don’t use it to make images that pretend to be photographs of things we do. Fera has real labs and real scientists, so when we needed pictures I booked a photographer and we shot them, in our own rooms, in our own lab coats. Half the sector runs the same stock library of generic labs and generic scientists, and generating a fake one is the same mistake with extra steps.
I don’t let it write anything factual that a person with the knowledge hasn’t checked. Every Fera page goes past the scientist who owns the subject.
I don’t hide it. The marketing team know exactly what the tool is, because they use it.
And I don’t pretend it’s a strategy. It’s a way of getting from a decision to a built thing faster, which only helps if the decision was any good.
The bit people ask about in interviews
I built a tool that lets a marketing team produce pages without a designer, and the obvious reading is that I automated part of my own discipline away.
The bottleneck was never the design. It was throughput. Writing a page took days, came back dense, went to a scientist, came back again needing heavy revision, and none of that was design work - it was a queue with my name on it. Taking the queue away meant I spent the time on the things that actually needed a designer: the system, the sub-brands, the report, the stands, the argument with an exec who thought brand meant the logo and the logo was fine.
The tools I use will be different in two years and I don’t much care. What made them work was having something precise enough for them to sit inside - a schema with real fields, components with real limits, a sign-off that stays with a human who knows the subject. Designers have been building that kind of thing for a long time without calling it infrastructure. It turns out to be the part that matters now.
"He performed at a level far beyond his title — the most knowledgeable, the most creative, the most able to see the vision."
— Dan Tweddle, Strategy Director, Only