ABOUT
Pocket Pixels is deliberately one person. You work directly with me from the first conversation through to final handoff. No account manager, no junior doing the first pass and no agency layer between the brief and the work.
Dean Martin
I’ve worked with founders on their first prototype and with companies moving real money at scale, across fintech, crypto, consumer apps, SaaS and games.
The last six of those years were spent as the lead designer inside a team of around thirty, mostly engineers, building one crypto group’s products through a full market cycle. The work had actual money on the other side of it. Before that came banking apps, celebrity fitness apps, marketplaces, and a lot of products that needed to look funded before they were.
I’m not a developer, but I’m technical enough to be useful. I understand app architecture, APIs, StoreKit, RevenueCat, React Native and Flutter well enough to design things your team can actually build, and to know when I’m asking for something expensive.
BRIEF HISTORY
I had already started designing while I was at university. Leaving Essex in 2005 marks the start of the full-time chapter, not the first time I opened a design tool.
I started inside a design agency and learned how real client projects move from brief to delivery. After that I went independent, working directly with startups, agencies and businesses across the UK, US and further afield.
Mortgage Calculator UK went live in 2014 and is still running today. Alongside it I built and shipped a much wider collection of consumer apps, with 75 later sold together as a portfolio.
I moved deep into crypto and Web3 as the lead designer inside a team of around thirty, most of them engineers. Over the next six years I worked across trading, DeFi, marketplaces, games, launch platforms and the wider product ecosystem through a complete market cycle.
After six years focused heavily on crypto and fintech, Pocket Pixels opens back up to outside client work with a much clearer focus: senior product design for fintech, crypto, AI and ambitious digital products.
HOW I WORK
You’re paying for judgement, not agreement. If I think a flow, feature or product decision has a problem, I’ll explain why before we spend time designing around it. The final decision is still yours.
Twenty-one years of pattern recognition means I can move quickly without turning every decision into a workshop. Smaller scopes can move in days. Larger product work usually runs over a few weeks. Speed comes from experience and clarity, not skipping the thinking.
I work close enough to development to understand when a design decision is simple, expensive or unrealistic. The goal is a product your team can actually ship, not a beautiful Figma file that quietly gets redesigned during implementation.
You brief me, I design the product and you talk directly to me about the work. No account-manager relay and no handoff to somebody you never met.
START A PROJECT
Send the Figma, live product, deck or even a rough message. I’ll tell you what I think it needs, whether I’m the right fit and roughly what it’ll cost.
Usually reply within one working day · No sales call required