Independent of the Year
Design Council annual, art direction category
WinnerHello. The name is
AugustReyes
I art-direct and design for teams who already know what they are building, and need it to feel like one thing instead of forty.
Book a call
Two slots open from September 2026
Independent of the Year 2025
Art Direction & Interface
Art
Direction
210+ launches behind me
Working across nine time zones
Shipped with 30+ product teams
Brightsill
Tessellate
Coalfield
Petrichor
Saltmarsh
Undergrove
Meridian
Working together
Most of my work arrives as a half-finished thing somebody is quietly worried about.
Send me yours and I will tell you what I would do with it — honestly, and before there is any question of an invoice. If it is not a fit, I will name someone who is.
Send me the briefDesign is mostly deciding what to leave out, then defending that decision for six straight weeks.
15
Years independent
40+
Teams partnered
96%
Would hire again
15
Years working independently, almost always with teams of under twenty people.
Background
Forty projects taught me the same lesson forty times.
I spent my twenties inside agencies making things look expensive. Somewhere around the fourth rebrand that never shipped, I started asking what the work was actually for. These days I take fewer clients, ask the awkward questions in week one, and stay until the thing is live.
- I read your support inbox before I open a design file.
- One senior person on the work from first call to launch — nothing gets passed down.
- If I think the project is the wrong project, you hear it before you pay me.
Engagements
Six ways to put me to work.
S/01
Art direction
One visual language across product, site and deck.
S/02
Interface design
Screens with the awkward states drawn too.
S/03
Design systems
Tokens, components and the rules that stop the drift.
S/04
Identity
Marks, type and colour scoped for a team with no designer.
S/05
Site build
Block-editor markup your marketing lead can run alone.
S/06
Second opinion
One week of full attention on a single flow.
How I work
Nothing exotic in the box.
Tools your team already has, files your team can open, and a handover that does not depend on me answering messages six months from now.
Art direction
One visual language, held across every surface.
Typography
Scales, pairings and a self-hosted font setup.
Motion
Transitions with a reason, and a reduced-motion path.
Responsive
Every layout checked from 320px through 1920px.
Block editor
Patterns and theme.json your marketing lead can run.
Colour
Palettes checked for contrast before they get pretty.
Systems
Naming that survives the next rebrand.
Accessibility
Contrast, focus order and keyboard paths, tested.
Selected work
Six projects, six different arguments.
2026
Brightsill console
Rebuilt first-run — setup completion up 44%
2025
Tessellate identity
A mark, a type scale and rules that fit on four pages
2025
Coalfield site
Block-editor rebuild the marketing team runs alone
2024
Petrichor reporting
Four spreadsheets folded down into one screen
2024
Saltmarsh packaging
A print system that held through five SKU launches
2023
Undergrove app
Checkout cut from eleven taps down to fiveThe shape of it
Four stages, and you see something every Thursday.
The order is load-bearing. Each stage hands the next one something it cannot start without, which is how we avoid designing a screen for a decision nobody has made.
Stage 01
Listen
Two calls with you, four with your customers, plus every support ticket you are willing to share. I come back with the problem in one paragraph and you tell me where I got it wrong.
Week 1
Stage 02
Frame
Structure, flows and the hard trade-offs on paper before anything gets styled. You sign off a skeleton, which costs far less to change than a finished screen.
Week 2
Stage 03
Draw
Full-fidelity work with real copy and the ugly states included — loading, empty, error, name-far-too-long. Reviewed live, cameras on, every Thursday.
Weeks 3–5
Stage 04
Leave well
Component library, tokens, a written spec and a walkthrough with your engineers. A month of questions answered at no charge afterwards.
Week 6The shelf
Occasionally somebody notices.
Interface of the Month
For the Petrichor reporting rebuild
FeatureAccessibility Merit
Undergrove checkout, WCAG 2.2 AA audit passed
MeritRebrand of the Year
Regional Brand Awards, shortlisted from 410 entries
FinalistSpeaker, Type & Interface
Talk: designing the states nobody screenshots
TalkIn their words
What clients say once the invoice is paid.
We briefed three studios before this one. August spent his first week inside our support inbox rather than a design file, then showed us the two screens costing us signups. Setup completion moved forty-four points.
Priya Raghunathan
Co-founder, Brightsill
The handover is the part that surprised me. Our two engineers built the entire marketing site from his component library in eight days and never once had to message him.
Tomas Berger
CTO, Coalfield
Fixed price, weekly demos, and in week two he told us to cut a feature rather than design it. That single conversation saved us a full quarter of engineering.
Elena Marchetti
Head of Product, Petrichor
Notebook
Things I keep having to explain.
The empty screen is the one that decides
Most teams design the full dashboard and bolt on a shrug for day one. That is backwards: the empty state is the only screen…
Read articleHello world!
Welcome to ScintillawpThemes Demo Sites. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!
Read article
Name your tokens for what they do
Call it brand-primary and you will be renaming four hundred references next year, the week the brand changes. Call it action-default and the rename…
Read articleFAQ
Asked before nearly every project.
Not sure yet?
Send a paragraph about what is going wrong. If I am not right for it I will say so and name someone who is, usually the same day.
Write to meA full product engagement runs six weeks end to end. An identity is three to four. A second opinion is one week. If your deadline is tighter than that, tell me early and I will say honestly whether it fits.
Yes, wherever the scope is defined. One number, one payment schedule and a written list of what sits inside it. Anything outside becomes a conversation before work starts, never a surprise line on an invoice.
That is the normal arrangement. I join your stand-ups, write specs in whatever format your team already uses, and stay reachable for a month after handover so questions get answered rather than guessed at.
Source files, a component library with every state documented, a token sheet, exported assets and a written spec covering behaviour and edge cases. Build engagements also include block patterns and a configured theme.json.
Sometimes. A single landing page, a pricing rewrite or a one-week review all fit comfortably. Anything larger tends to work better as a short sprint than as hours scattered across a quarter.
You do, completely, once the final payment clears. Files transfer into your accounts rather than living in mine. I only ask permission to show the work publicly, and I will keep it private if you would rather.
Two slots open from September
Have you got something that deserves doing properly?
Tell me what is broken, who it is breaking for, and what happens if it stays that way. That is enough for me to come back with a scope and a number.
