Regular design and development expertise
for award-winning e-learning providers

Introduction

Initially, I applied for a small piece of introductory work for Fantom Factory, who were looking for a designer to come in and help them add some polish to their world of data analytics and e-learning capabilities.

Luckily for me, that initial piece of work blossomed into years of working together across (seemingly) hundreds of projects, both on the large-scale with brand new marketing sites and data visualisation assignments, and the small-scale with mini JS or SVG enhancements to their many excellent ventures.

I've now been working with the team for 3 years, with one of those as a full-time employee. There are countless projects I've worked on over those years that I could hone-in on for this case study, but I'll focus instead on this initial challenge that got my foot in the door: abstracting and improving the look-and-feel of their primary e-learning platform; a job I was thoroughly looking forward to sinking my teeth into.

Solution

I dove straight into Figma, building on top of th existing platform to create a clearer, corporate-friendly, visually appealing, and user-friendly interface that aligned with Fantom Factory's goals: a cleaner design and a better UX. Even more challenging was the requirement that the team at Fantom Factory would be able to customise the resulting interface to align to the branding of their third-party clients, without the whole design falling apart.

As the sole designer for the project, it was vital that I began with a comprehensive exploration of Fantom Factory's vision, which naturally evolved into an extensive set of prototype designs - including third-party branded versions that enabled the team to truly visualise their end goal.

Once the designs were tweaked, refined and agreed, I then utilised my skills as a developer to help build the templates for real-world use. While many projects I've worked on rely on well-established languages or platforms like WordPress, Fantom Factory is different. One of the founders, Steve Eynon (herein referred to as "The Wizard"), wrote a custom CSS pre-processor called FASS, based on the popular SCSS extension, that would work with the Slim templating engine. So, instead of using familiar syntax and set-ups, I got up-to-speed on FASS and built out a bunch of templates using it, aligning my code to The Wizard's code rules. Many designers are just that - designers only. Luckily, I'm a hybrid, which is something that continues to be a huge benefit to work I undertake.

Outcome

Considering this first project led to another, and another, and later full-time employment, I think it's safe to say that this initial collaboration with Fantom Factory was a massive success.

Together, we built a platform for a more engaging and effective educational user experience, all while fostering a brilliant working partnership across multiple areas of the business. Fantom Factory is benefiting from the flexibility and diverse expertise I provide, and the resulting work speaks for itself. It was, and continues to be, an awesome company to be a part of!

Check out some of my public-facing projects for Fantom Factory:

• Fantom Factory
• Green Analytics
• Alpha Colony
• No Ordinary Ant