I’m Tim, a designer with 20+ years of experience crafting design language for products in the software, publishing and training industries.
I apply systems thinking to design language, with a focus on icon design, illustration and art direction.
Through craft and design advocacy I highlight the small details of visual language that shape customer trust and product understanding.
As a team collaborator, I’m as comfortable in the terminal and git as I am in Figma.
Design Systems
For the past 5 years I’ve been part of HubSpot’s design system team. Over time we matured and maintained the Canvas design system and more recently, as the team has grown, we focused on building the next version of HubSpot’s design language and theming.
Product Illustration
Employing effective illustrations makes concepts easy to understand, improves recognition, and considers the emotional context of users’ actions.
Many of the features and customer actions in a SaaS environment are largely invisible processes. To help make these tasks feel human and approachable we can use understandable visual metaphor.
Illustrations should express an overall brand, complement supporting text, and be used appropriately in each context — a complex financial transaction is different from a celebratory learning milestone in software.
Icon Design
The number of universally recognized icons is small so we strive in icon design to create meaningful, quickly identifiable designs.
I’ve managed icon systems in the hundreds of symbols, always collaborating with designers and teams to maintain a high bar when deciding to add new designs to a library.
Beyond providing effective designs, icon systems help designers and developers employ icons effectively and provide guidance for scale, properties, and usage that ultimately helps users make the next right choice for them.
HubSpot’s Navigation
Icon Design
In 2024, as the main navigation team was working on a rethink of HubSpot’s navigation hierarchy and user experience, I partnered with them and each of the product groups represented on the home page. We developed a cleaner, clearer icon set for our customers that also introduced some of the new visual language coming in the next version of the design system.
Book Illustration
As a book illustrator and designer my work has spanned educational and trade publishing, from working for major brands such as Disney and PBS Kids Arthur, to partnering with smaller, independent publishers.
Series work includes developing the I See I Learn Series for Charlesbridge and Stuart J. Murphy.
