I joined mental health startup Mind Ease early as it’s Head of Creative and helped take it from a web-only MVP to an investor-backed cross platform app with tens of thousands of users and a 4.5 or above rating on both the App Store and Google Play.
In 2025 the product was acquired by the Campaign Against Living Miserably and then re-branded as their flagship CALMzone app.
KEY ACHIEVEMENTS
In my 5 years of leading creative at the company between 2018 and 2023, I:
> Established UI, brand, illustration & animation design systems
> Hired and managed team of two designers
> Creatively led the creation of all marketing materials, social content, adverts and pitch decks, leading to a £1m investment round during Covid
> Designed, tested, launched, continuously iterated apps & online presence
> Oversaw qualitative user research and quantitative data collection for making informed decisions
> Managed a lean kanban board, ran hackathons and nurtured development
IN-HOUSE ILLUSTRATION STYLE
Dozens of narrative image sets created in house. Art directed by myself and hands on co-produced with the illustrator on my team, Delia Racheru. A textured, organic feel with soft colour palettes.
Style demo
Examples of exercise covers, each part of a narrative set. Above is cover for an exercise about working through issues using CBT.
^Narrative set example for an exercise about hopelessness.
IN-HOUSE ANIMATION
Gentle looping motions produced in-house by myself and my team that covered in-app delight, social media posts and video ads. Few examples below.
MULTIPLE TOUCH POINTS
Our creative identity, across multiple output types.
Blog articles
Social media posts
Partnership activations
Illustration-led app UI
BUDGET LIVE ACTION ADS
Created a system for budget live action adverts with swappable backgrounds and screens, by art directing small scale production companies through shoots and then doing the post production in-house with my team.
Example of a simple ad for YouTube we created in 2022 (along with BTS shot and storyboard frame).
PERSONAS
Empathy with users and target audiences. Championed a custom template that blends the best ideas of commonly used personas layouts in order to create a hollistic sense of users that guided creative decisions across the board.
^Example persona from our set.
UI DESIGN PRINCIPLES
I led the creation of a unified design system in Figma that centered responsiveness, modularity, editability and a real-to-life prototyping approach that allowed for more accurate user feedback before builds were coded.
^Responsive cards set up demo.
^Editable components demo. A system of switches and editable custom fields made changing design templates quick and easy for team members experimenting with new app content.
^Realistic prototypes example: sliders that enable users to dial in their mood are fully interactive.
USER CENTRIC UX DESIGN
Optimised each of the main app flows to provide real benefit to users with the least amount of friction.
^Redesigned home screen to be highly customisable breathing tool, merging features users loved in our studies.
^Main “Calm Me” flow, validated in a randomised control study, based on a slider system that captures users’ mood that I designed and helped create. Essentially an intelligent exercise recommender with delight elements.
^For the onboarding flow, we researched successful health & fitness onboards & behavioural psychology, iterated on designs using quantitative and qualitative studies, used A/B testing and added delight and polish with animation, resulting in a 125% increase in trial starts that brought our trial start rate to the industry standard for the Health & Fitness app sector at the time.