James Gilyead

In addition to working at Clearleft since 2016, James has been a freelance designer for over a decade, tackling a range of creative briefs for international clients. These projects have involved front-end design and coding, photography, illustration, branding, and plenty of print design.

Keep it simple and systematic

James prioritises designing high-quality foundations to speed up delivery and improve consistency of digital product design. Approaching every project with a systematic mindset, he works hard to make digital products and services straightforward for real people in the real world.

While working at Clearleft James co-created Utopia – an elegant approach to fluid responsive design.

Recent thoughts

Viewpoint

Some of the best free fonts
As a product designer I generally do my best to help people find and think about content, not fonts. My preference is for clear, practical typography that supports a product's visual identity and adds no friction between a person and their goal.
Tiny Lesson

Designing a Utopian layout grid: working with fluid responsive values in a static design tool.
A layout grid is a useful aid for a designer organising information in a given space. Although these grids have their roots in print design, where dimensions are fixed, fluid layout grids still have some utility in responsive design.
Designing with fluid type scales

Breakpoint-based type sizing has always felt a bit arbitrary to me. It seems like equal parts guesswork and compromise, where the better we want it to work, the more stuff we need to design. It strikes me as inelegant and inefficient.
Tiny Lesson

Tiny Lesson: 3 useful Figma features
I recently started designing and prototyping in Figma and I want to quickly show you three useful features I’ve discovered. Those are smart selection, colour styles, and prototype master connections.

James works with

Richard Rutter

Cofounder & Managing Director

Jordan Healy

Marketing Executive

Frances Ulph

Marketing Manager

Sam O'Neill

Senior Design Engineer