Designer and builder for the web

Hi, I'm Chris Feddersen. I’m a Melbournian, husband and Dad currently working as a freelance web designer and previously as a senior designer at Artisan Digital.

A typical day consists of designing user interfaces and design systems for a website and translating that design into robust, responsive and scalable front-end code. I care about the details when it comes to user experience, interactions, aesthetics and layout. Having designed and built data rich wagering based applications since 2011, I have developed an expert eye for intuitive UI design.

A love of learning and a desire to be continually improving has allowed me to bring a process-driven focus and be a positive cultural influence on the teams I have worked with.

That's the elevator pitch. If you want the back story keep on reading!

2010

I began my journey by returning to study multimedia design before landing my first role as a web designer at Artisan Digital.

I realised that I was super passionate about design and development and I was fortunate enough to have found an industry where I could do both

2011 - 2012

Artisan Digital provides a range of design services across different industries, but their speciality is designing customer-facing user interfaces for online bookmaking applications. Their primary client until 2014 was Sportingbet, one of Australia's largest online bookmakers. Artisan Digital would partner with software developers Stride Solutions, also based in Melbourne to produce the front-ends for the web and later, native apps. Since then the partnership has designed and built wagering applications for Betting Club, BlueBet and startups such as PickChamps, SportChamps and Swopstakes. I initially cut my teeth with simple photoshop cut-ups and marketing banners,

I won't forget my first piece of work for our major client Sportingbet. It was a small promotion page for the website. I had created an elegant design and provided the HTML/CSS to a developer to populate it with real data. At the end of our weekly review consisting of designers, developers and project admin it was decided to present it on the giant screen. I was excited to see how it turned out. A couple of clicks later and ..... devastation. It looked completely broken. I had failed to consider how my design would look with real data. A rookie mistake. Yes, a username could be longer than "John Smith". Text overran different areas of the design, and the images didn't fit. It was a disaster. At least from my perspective. I went back to my desk to fix it quickly. I vowed my designs would never look like that again. It was a valuable lesson to learn early on.

I had failed to consider how my design would look with real data. A rookie mistake.

Before too long I was given significant projects for Sportingbet. Large projects, stretching 3 - 6 months that would include two to three designers per project where we would design the user-interfaces, build the HTML & CSS and then hand over to the development team to develop in Angular JS.

After gaining experience and successfully contributing to numerous projects, I progressed to leading the design team on million dollar redesigns for the Sportingbet and Centrebet websites. I began supervising and mentoring junior designers and being responsible for the team's output, productivity and accuracy of estimating project tasks.

2013 - 2015

My most significant achievements came off the back of identifying a gap at the intersection of the design and development teams. The static designs we handed over would not go far enough to capture animations, interactions and the small details fully. The differences that make an application enjoyable and a memorable user experience. There were too many questions left unanswered with the developers required to fill in the blanks. Often not producing the best outcome. As a team, we needed to progress from delivering static interface designs to fully fledged web prototypes.

While it was an iterative process over some years and projects, the design team made this progression possible by adopting a component driven approach and a "think like a developer" mentality when it came to design. We began building living style guides and component libraries in addition to our full-page compositions. We introduced tooling into our process that moved us from being designers that coded up HTML/CSS to an integral part of the development process.

Some of the specifics include:

• Version controlling our designs and code with GIT
• Adopted BEM methodology for CSS and curating a framework which we shipped from project to project. In the process, we moved to writing styles in Sass
• Taking a component driven approach to design with a focus on component states. Our designs became robust and fully considered to handle dynamic data and edge case scenarios
• Producing asset libraries and living style guides that made project maintenance, scalability and handover simple
• Designed with realistic data. We began using Jekyll to template our designs and pull in this data
• We automated our workflow and build tasks with Grunt and more recently Webpack

To this date, development teams that work with Artisan Digital praise the unique and comprehensive approach to asset delivery

2016 - 2018

During my time at Artisan Digital, I mostly worked on wagering based projects. The technical and complex nature of the applications has appealed to me. It also helped to have an interest in sports. In 2016 Genius Sports acquired Total Betting Solutions, which was the end-to-end wagering solution of which Artisan Digital designed the front-ends. As part of this acquisition, I worked solely on Genius Sports products, under the Artisan Digital umbrella. During this time I continued to deliver the same value to the clients and developers I worked with.

2019 - 2021

My role at Artisan Digital evolved into managing, mentoring and training others. I was in more meetings, planning and estimation sessions. Involved more in startup product design and overseeing the work of other designers. I spent more time in front of and communicating with clients. This was an invaluable learning experience. There were successes and even some projects that I wouldn't consider so. Despite my expanding role within the business, after 10 years it was time for change. I finished with Artisan Digital during 2021. After the successful completion of the Bluebet website redesign. I'll be forever grateful for my time there. From everything I learned, to the friends I made.

2022

During a break from full time work I have been able to enjoy more time with my son. I balance work time between freelancing and working on my own products. A couple of which are due out in the second half of 2022. Stay tuned...