Portfolio
Journal
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Tilly Dyson (Starbit’s latest recruit) interviews Jonathan Stevens (CEO and Creative Director) on the eve of the company’s 5th birthday to get an insight into where Starbit came from and where the team are going next.
Team
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We are a small but firmly established company, with specialist in-house design and development teams.
Our collective skills span digital strategy, brand identity, graphic design, full stack development and hardware provisioning.
Jonathan Stevens
CEO & Creative Director
Jonathan provides project management and creative direction for Starbit. He is an experienced digital designer with more than ten years worth of multimedia projects to his name. He founded Starbit with the launch of their first website in 2005 and formed the limited company in 2011. Throughout the evolution of Starbit, his pursuit of design innovation in the digital space has remained the lynchpin.
Jonathan is extremely proud of the outstanding team of designers and developers who have joined him along the way to make Starbit what it is in 2017. Day-to-day he likes nothing better than throwing new challenges at them and witnessing the plethora of great ideas that get bounced back.
Having undertaken an MA (Hons) dissertation on climate change and a subsequent MSc in Environmental Sustainability, Jonathan continues a keen interest in environmental issues. He is an avid reader of non-fiction on the subject and, where he can, looks to reduce his carbon footprint in various ways. These include solar panels on his roof, cycling almost everywhere and growing his own vegetables.
Carine Pic
Web Developer
Carine is a full-stack developer with several years of experience working both as a freelancer and for various web agencies in France. She comes from the mountainous region around Grenoble, home to a thriving tech and start-up scene. On moving to the UK to further her academic studies, she joined Starbit and decided to stick around.
Carine possesses a versatile digital skillset spanning HTML, CSS, PHP, Javascript/jQuery and MySQL. She has a French diploma in multimedia (2 year HND equivalent) and a BSc in Computing with distinction (from Edinburgh Napier University) covering user experience and web technologies. She is both curious and ambitious, never resting on her laurels and always seeking to improve as a developer. She also likes helping others and has a real interest in teaching web technologies. Her goal over the next year is to take on more project management duties to make the best use of the full gamut of her personal skills.
Carine has recently started a vegan way of life, part of which is motivated by her sincere love of animals. She takes care of four cats in France and misses them a lot. She is also fond of the countryside and cycling with many years of experience in managing a French cycling association and organising competitions.
Kevin Falencik
Lead Developer
Kevin takes responsibility for heading up our development department. He is an experienced full-stack developer, able to tackle almost any coding conundrum. Very little seems to phase him and somewhere up his sleeve there would appear to be a solution for everything. He ensures the development stage of all projects are taken care of, pulling together contributions from the rest of the development team as well as the design department. He also looks after our clients in a support role, fixing things super quickly when issues arise.
Kevin studied IT and Web Application Design within the Technical Department at the Complex of Communication Schools in Gdansk. He has previously worked as a web developer in Poland, where he gained several years experience in Drupal 6 & 7 development, both in building sites from scratch and converting existing HTML sites. He is committed to improving his skills on a daily basis and is always enthusiastic about adopting new tools and ways of working. He ensures that the company’s development resources are allocated in the most efficient way possible and makes sure the rest of the team don’t get lost along the way.
Kevin loves coding innovative digital things. He also likes travelling, creating (and listening to) music and tattoos.
Tilly Dyson
User Experience Designer
Tilly is our user experience specialist, designing websites and apps from a UX perspective. Her daily grind involves working with clients to document their intentions for a product, structuring information architecture, and illustrating sitemaps, wireframes and user journeys. Not only a fully qualified graphic designer with an honours degree from Edinburgh College of Art, Tilly has also subesquently immersed herself in the UX and digial design community here in Edinburgh. She has recently completed a UX training course and in January 2017 participated in The Product Forge Future Health Hackathon. Her team's digital prototype was judged to be one of the top four product outcomes from the weekend, and has received encouragement and support for further development by NHS Scotland.
Tilly has a strong interest in human-centred design thinking, social innovation and prototyping. She is fascinated by interaction design - looking at design in the context of how people interact with others and their surroundings. She has a firm conviction in the importance of designing for, and with, the people at the heart of the problem. Her final degree project incorporated the design of an app for those dealing with the impact of dementia on a friend or relative. Her work was shown in the D&AD New Blood Festival 2016.
Tilly is a competitive triathlete and is currently learning Swedish (22% fluent when this was written).
Hantian Zhang
Graphic Designer
Hantian is a long-standing member of the Starbit team. He is a graphic designer with an eclectic mix of high-level software skills, encompassing the Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, After-Effects) and Blender (for 3D work). He specialises in brand identity development and user experience (UX) design for our digital projects. He also takes responsibility for digital product testing, working closely with the development department at every stage of a project.
Originally from Nanjing in China, Hantian built the foundations of his interests in graphic and digital design during his undergraduate study of Fine Arts in China. Following this and two years worth of commercial experience in a Chinese creative studio, he came to the UK to study a masters degree in Design & Digital Media (awarded with distinction) and is currently taking this further with a PhD in Mobile UX at Edinburgh College of Art. He believes that user experience is all around us, and that all forms of design need to be understood by all relevant stakeholders. Hantian is always seeking out new creative ideas to make each design different, iconic and self-explanatory. He loves working collaboratively with clients and the rest of the team and has a strong conviction in the best results coming from the maximum possible level of cooperation.
Hantian loves browsing Pinterest for new design ideas and reading books about UX theories. He is also a big fan of audio novels, badminton, music, guitar playing, tech devices, museums, travelling and photography.
Chris Kelly
Web Developer
Chris hails from the bigger smoke (London) and came to Edinburgh looking for new adventures. Fortunately he found Starbit and embarked on their universally digital journey, quickly settling in as a full-stack developer (or as he is fond of calling himself: a code monkey).
From an early age, Chris has never hidden his avid interest in science and technology. He studied an undergraduate degree in Astronomy, Space Science and Astrophysics at the University of Kent, with a final year project that involved working in collaboration with BAE Systems on Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). He then found his true passion for coding during his postgraduate MSc in Computer Science, which involved a dissertation on developing a mobile application for taxi businesses. He has refined his craft with positions at several London agencies and lots of supplementary experimentation, collaboration and freelance work.
He loves to learn new things and is always on the lookout for opportunities to learn new programming languages. Chris is also a keen gamer and writer. He is currently working on getting his first novel published, along with writing the sequel and exploring ideas for a future fictional saga.
Chloé David
Web Developer
Chloé has joined us for four months on an industrial placement which is part of her degree course in Multimedia and Internet Technologies at the University of Grenoble. Being from the Alps, the self-declared "new French one" felt instantly at home in Edinburgh's hilly and sometimes chilly landscape. Chloé is curious and full of ambition when it comes to learning programming languages. She already has HTML, CSS, PHP and Javascript under her belt, along with a good working knowledge of Wordpress and Prestashop. She is currently being introduced to the joys of Drupal and is learning fast. We've given her an exciting inhouse project to focus her efforts on and we've already seen some signs of greatness.
In her spare time, Chloé likes to discover new music, food & drink, places, cultures and people. She confesses she is prone to shyness when meeting new people but this doesn't seem to have lasted long at Starbit.
