No. 01Product · 2025
Marginalia
A reading app that turns your highlights and marginal notes into a searchable personal index. I built the reading surface, the annotation model, and offline-first sync.
- React
- TypeScript
- IndexedDB
- PWA
Design engineer, illustrator — Edinburgh
Drawn first,then built.
I'm Rowan — a design engineer who still reaches for a 2B pencil before a text editor. I make interfaces that feel considered, tactile, and quietly alive.
Selected work
A few things I've drawn and built
No. 02Tool · 2024
Silverpoint
A browser drawing tool with pressure-sensitive vector strokes and a real paper-grain canvas. I wrote the stroke engine and a WASM smoothing pipeline that keeps lines honest.
- Canvas
- WebGL
- Rust · WASM
- Pointer Events
No. 03System · 2024
Foundry
An editorial design system for a books publisher — 200+ tokens, a variable type scale, and a Figma-to-code pipeline that kept design and engineering telling the same story.
- Design tokens
- Style Dictionary
- Figma API
- Storybook
No. 04Concept · 2023
Nightpost
A slow reader for long-form writing. I designed the calm typographic reading experience and a quiet notification model that respects your evening instead of interrupting it.
- Next.js
- Postgres
- Typography
- Motion
About
The short version, in my own hand.
still drawing strangers on the train, badly and happilyFor ten years I've worked in the seam between design and engineering — the place where a flat mockup becomes something you can actually click, and where most of the good decisions quietly get made or lost.
I trained as an illustrator long before I wrote a line of code, and it shows. I still sketch every interface on paper first, because a pencil is faster than any prototyping tool and far more honest about what isn't working yet.
These days I build design systems and the front-of-the-frontend for studios and small product teams. I like problems that need both halves of the brain: a type scale that has to survive real content, an animation that has to feel inevitable rather than decorative.
The work I care about looks calm and reads slow, but it's held together by an obsessive amount of small craft — the easing on a menu, the weight of a rule, the half-second before a page settles into place.
A pencil is the most honest prototyping tool I own.
Toolkit
What I reach for
Interface & interaction
- React & TypeScript
- Motion & micro-interaction
- Accessibility first
- Progressive enhancement
Type & layout
- Editorial typography
- Design systems
- Variable fonts
- CSS architecture
By hand
- Illustration
- Hand-lettering
- Figma & prototyping
- Storyboarding
Foundations
- Next.js
- Node & APIs
- Web performance
- Design tokens
Contact
Let's make something considered.
I take on a small number of studio and product projects each year — design systems, tricky front-end, the occasional illustration. If that sounds like your kind of thing, say hello.