William Owen
I have been making things for the web since the late nineties, which means I have watched the same arguments come round about four times now. I design interfaces, I build them, and I spend the rest of my time asking people uncomfortable questions about their reasoning.
Wicked Origami Ltd is the company I do all of it through.
Leading and mentoring
Mostly other people’s work
The work I am proudest of is mostly other people’s. I have led front-end teams and mentored developers into roles they did not think they were ready for, and I would rather leave a team that can do something than a codebase only I understand.
How I think
Two things about my brain
I am dyslexic and aphantasic — I cannot picture things in my head, and I will misspell a word I have written a thousand times.
Neither is a disclaimer. Not having a mind’s eye means I cannot fool myself that I have visualised a design, so I build it early and look at it properly. Dyslexia came with the pattern-matching that makes an unfamiliar codebase resolve into shapes faster than reading it line by line. Both are also the reason I care so much about writing things down clearly: I have never been able to rely on holding it all in my head.
This is also, fairly directly, where the critical reflection work came from. If you cannot trust your own internal picture, you learn early to check the reasoning instead.
Elsewhere
Find me on
Want to talk?
About work, about reasoning, or about neither. I reply to everything myself.