Hi, I'm Ed Hockings.
Lead Product Designer specialising in user-centred design, design systems and organisational design.
For the past decade, I've been helping organisations figure out how to design well at scale. Across multiple brands, distributed teams, and the messy reality of how product decisions actually get made.
Core Skills.
Strategic Design Leadership.
I've spent years shaping how design works at scale. The strategy, the standards, and the people who carry them forward.
Building Design Community.
Getting designers actually aligned is half the job. I run workshops, facilitate critiques, and make sure good ideas don't die in Slack threads.
Cross-Functional Collaboration.
I'm comfortable sitting at the intersection of design and engineering. That's where the real calls get made.
Systems Thinking.
Seven years deep in design systems. The tokens, the components, the documentation, and the culture that make people actually use them.
User-Centered Design.
Research should shape your design decisions, not validate them. I keep users close throughout, from early direction through to all of the important final details.
Accessibility Champion.
Accessibility has been baked into how I design since my time at Nationwide. I treat it as a design principle that sits at the start of the process.
Experience.
Over a decade of experience designing across diverse industries.
Lead Product Designer
(Design Systems)
Toyota Connected Europe.
Leading the strategic development and evolution of Toyota's design system, driving consistency and efficiency across digital products globally. Defining global design standards and framework models while supporting distributed teams worldwide.
Lead Product Designer
(App Team)
Toyota Connected Europe.
Interim Design Lead guiding 8 designers across the car companion app on iOS and Android. Set accessibility standards and partnered with senior stakeholders to define new visual direction across 3 brands supporting light and dark modes.
Senior Product Designer
(Design Systems)
Moonpig.
Sole design system designer with significant autonomy, introducing a token-based design system across multiple brands, themes and platforms. Wore multiple hats: Librarian, Facilitator, Campaigner, Analyst, Stylist, and Manager.
Senior UI Designer
(Design Systems)
Nationwide Building Society.
Lead UI on the design system team. Maintained Figma libraries, ran discovery sprints, provided design reviews, and built a strong community focus through regular check-ins and engagement.
UI Designer
Nationwide Building Society.
I worked as an embedded feature designer and contributed to design system development and component documentation. A large focus on onboarding flows and embedding Gestalt principles within the design team.
Digital Product Designer
Booking.com
Booking.com runs on data, so I got very good at designing within that world. A/B tests, conversion optimisation, accessibility improvements. I also pushed for user research to sit alongside the metrics, not just validate them.
About Me.
Hey there, I'm Ed 👋 I'm a seasoned designer currently leading the design systems team at Toyota Connected Europe.
Whether it's on a strategic or pragmatic level, I'm passionate about all things design. My users aren't always external customers. A lot of my work is about making life easier for the designers and developers building the product.
For the past seven years, I've been focused on designing systems. The goal is to empower product teams to design things that people enjoy using, through the use of shared pattern libraries, coded components, and documentation.
I'm also a capable front-end web developer. I love to stay close to the code as well as the craft. It means I know when something designed won't survive contact with a codebase.
