Tommy Toner: Curiosity & Design in Larger Organisations

44m · Design Meets Business · 09 Oct 01:48

On today's show Tommy and I discuss what separates successful designers from the less successful ones, the two viable career choices for creatives, and what he's looking for in a portfolio when he's hiring.

Connect with Tommy

Website, LinkedIn, Medium, Cuckoo

Full transcript

Christian: Welcome to Design Meets Business, a show that inspires designers to think beyond pixels. I'm your host Christian Vasile, and on this podcast I sit down with creatives to talk about their stories, lessons they've learned during their careers, and how you can use Design to make a bigger impact in your organisation.

Today we're talking to Tommy Toner, former Design Director at Nissan, and currently co-founder of UK’s emerging broadband startup Cuckoo. We're talking about what separates successful designers from the less successful ones, the two viable career choices for creatives, and what he's looking for in a portfolio when he's hiring.

Tommy, thank you so much for joining Design Meets Business. Really, really a pleasure to have you here. I've been looking forward to having a chat with you for a while, so it's awesome to finally have you here. Just to give everyone else a background, everyone else who hasn't heard about you yet. Can’t be too many of them, but there might be a few.

So you've got a very diverse background spanning a lot of freelance roles and the now Head of UX and Brand at an upcoming player on the broadband market. We're going to talk a bit about that. So we’re going to talk about all your career and maybe your time at Nissan and leading design there, and what you've learned from that.

But before we go into all that good stuff, let's start talking a bit about your background, how you started out as a front-end developer actually, and what made you drop that for a career in Design?

Tommy: Hi, Christian. Firstly, thank you so much for having me on board. I've been -- it's been exciting to join you for this chat today under super relevant topics. Hopefully, we'll have a good chat today. Yes. So before I go into sort of my more recent professional history, I thought it'd be interesting to mention how it all began. So this is actually a secret that I've not told many people that you might find interesting.

So I don't know if you're familiar, but there used to be a game called Command and Conquer Tiberian Sun, which was a PC game. So I'm not a gamer by any means. However, this one game captured my imagination. And I was very involved in the community with a clan and sort of play playing online with friends of age about 14 at this period.

So I got into chatting on the forum, of which I was then inspired to start creating some visual assets for my team or my clans, kind of signatures on the forum. And that was actually how I first learned and taught myself Photoshop -- Adobe Photoshop properly CS1 or whatever it was back then. So from then, that was kind of sparked my sort of love of design. I wasn't actually an art student at the period, so it was all quite new to me, sort of in those early days of sort of the interactive web. It was an exciting time and is where visual design first started playing sort of a big role.

So, yes. Then I went on to study at the University of Leeds; a degree called New Media. Now, the reason why I wanted to bring that up is because I think people might find it interesting. It was before really user experience was an established academic course, which is much more common now. You can study human-centered design much in a variety of universities across the world, and it's a much more kind of, I guess, more established and respected profession now.

But when I was doing it, this course was called New Media, which my parents, I think, had – weren’t too keen on and found quite amusing. My dad actually, I think, called it a Mickey Mouse subject, which was basically, it was a hybrid of design meets kind of communication. That was kind of where I learned my trade, and that was a bit of code flown in, and it was actually called F usion, which unfortunately is no use whatsoever anymore.

So that was kind of where I then, as you say, my first role outside of university was a front-end developer, an agency which I loved. I mean, I found it incredibly frustrating at times because it wasn't really -- I didn't study Computer Science. I wasn't necessarily a coder by trade, but I kind of threw myself into it, and in the end, it paid dividends later on. Like, even to this day, when I'm creating user interfaces, that first role as a front-end developer was super important.

After that front-end developer role, I was looking to -- I wanted to go back to my sort of creative roots. It was what I've really enjoyed, but I didn't really know where to start or where to look. I popped up a portfolio, and then I ended up getting a role at Sky, BSkyB, which in the UK is a huge corporation, but they have a number of different sub-brands from broadband to sports and television etc.

I started as an acquisition designer, so designing ad banners. I don't know if you're familiar with ActionScript 3. And then, after that, I kind of moved into a more product design role, which was my first exposure to user experience and user interface design as a sort of trade. It was something I was fascinated in because I was able to maintain being a creative visual designer, but I was able to fix and solve complex problems which is what I think we hopefully will talk -- is kind of where I get a lot of my inspiration from. I enjoy problem-solving. And I think that's where design is super valuable for business. It's ultimately fixing complex problems through design.

After Sky, which was up in Leeds in Northern England, I kind of made my move to the big city of London. Very naive, not knowing I made the move to go -- decision to go freelance. And I'd never done that before, like in a professional capacity. Obviously, I'd helped out friends and family businesses and sort of smaller companies. So I spent about six years in the London design and advertising agency space, where I was lucky enough to work on some awesome international brands from websites to apps to sort of mixed reality experiences.

And then, more recently, I joined Nissan, the automotive brand where I started off as a designer. And I was sort of the second UX designer actually in the global sort of experience team as it were. There wasn't really an established user experience practice in Nissan at a global level at that stage. So it was kind of up to us to kind of define what are the processes, how can we add value to the customer experience across all of these different journeys at Nissan. And then, as time went on, we grew the team quite rapidly, and our influence across Nissan in terms of what value we could add was growing.M y role got elevated to Design Director, where I was also the User Experience Manager, managing a team of UX designers, UI designers.

And then that kind of brings me up to current day, which is my briefs -- my most recent venture that I want to talk about today is Cuckoo. And for those that don't know Cuckoo Broadband, it's a UK-based Internet service provider. And we've just launched a couple of months ago. The broadband industry in the UK is somewhat broken in the sense that you look at things like Trustpilot or NPS scores in the UK broadband companies, and they're outrageously low. It's quite shocking, actually.

So, in the same way, Monzo and Revolut came in and disrupted the finance sector or Bulb Energy or Octopus, if you're based in the UK, came and disrupted the energy sector, the idea of Cuckoo Broadband came about that we could apply these similar principles — customer first sort of approach to a design-led approach to our product — and there was scope to disrupt this market.

Christian: All right. Thanks. That's a very comprehensive background about yourself. That's all good, no more questions for there. One thing that I've noticed is that you've worked across different types of companies in different types of sectors and at different types of levels. So I'm wondering, in your experience, how is design treated and approached and applied in agencies versus how is it applied and approached when you're in-house?

Tommy: Yes. Great question. I'll start with the agency world. And again, this is going to depend on whether you're hired as a freelancer or whether you're hired as a permanent member of an agency team.

When you're a freelancer, you're more of a hired gun, and you might not be exposed to the sort of more strategic side of a project, whereas when you’re in-house in an agency, you're going to be very much part of the team trying to solve and meet a client's needs. So how it would typically work is, a client or brands would come with a problem that they can't solve in-house. And that might be because they don't have the in-house expertise, like to give you an example, it might be that a lot of in-house brands might not have a motion designer, a motion department. So in order to -- if they're putting off, maybe it's a campaign for growth, or it might be some kind of interactive experience that they want to launch on their site, that typically might not be something an in-house team could pull off. So that's where the specialism comes in.

So what you'll find with the sort of agency world is you have some incredibly talented people all brought together to solve one problem or a series of problems. And the differences, I think, with in-house, is the ability to not just have your eye on the project at hand, but also to have tha

The episode Tommy Toner: Curiosity & Design in Larger Organisations from the podcast Design Meets Business has a duration of 44:15. It was first published 09 Oct 01:48. The cover art and the content belong to their respective owners.