About Us

Mark Boulton Design is a design studio working with organisations big and small. We have an obsession with simplicity and a knack of fusing user experience design with traditional design practice. We make smart, simple stuff; beautifully.

People

We’re eight people who care about the web and good design. We’re not into buzzwords or chasing the competition; we just want to do a great job and have fun whilst we’re at it.

We run workshops and have spoken at many web conferences all over the world such as Drupalcon, SXSWi, Future of Web Design, Web Directions South, Build and @media.

We write for some of the industry's most notable publications; A List Apart, 24ways, Think Vitamin, .net Magazine. Scratching our own itch to create beautiful, useful and simple books for the web professional, we also write books and publish them under our Imprint Five Simple Steps.

Place

Penarth is a little town on the South Coast of Wales close to Cardiff. Just a short two hour train ride from London, South Wales has it all: thriving cities, mountain air, beautiful beaches and thriving victorian seaside towns. This is where we work.

Huddled away in a renovated coachhouse, we work on stuff that excites us; for clients and for ourselves. Constantly striving to create the most creative working environment – from a constant supply of fruit, to a company Modern Warfare 2 clan – we believe a great workplace equals happy people which equals good work. It’s a simple formula and our clients benefit.

Meet the team

Mark

Northerner living in Wales. Husband, Daddy and Uncle. Creative Director at Mark Boulton Design and co-founder of Five Simple Steps.

Alex

User Experience Director at @markboultondsg. I design stuff. I like bikes.

Emma

Emma wears lots of different hats as a Director and UX Researcher at Mark Boulton Design and a Director of Five Simple Steps. When she's not working, she's being a Mum and when she gets a minute to herself, she's rather fond of yoga, snowboarding and floral design.

Sarah

Studio Manager @markboultondsg/@fivesimplesteps

Dan

Dan is an Interaction Designer / Front End Developer and general Ski nut.

Nick

Front end Design/Development, Member of @markboulton design crew — Design and production for @fivesimplesteps. General Apple Nut. VW lover.

Colin

Colin is an emerging Illustrator, Photographer and Designer. I'm also an apprentice @markboultondsg

Site

This site is built with loving care, spit and polish and the help of these bits of software:

Drupal

Drupal is an open source content management platform. We like Drupal. Over the past eighteen months, we've helped the Drupal Association and community make their website look better and their software easier to use. So, we have a somewhat special relationship with the software.

Typekit

We use Typekit to typeset the content in Proxima Nova and FF Tisa Web Pro, for those browsers capable of importing fonts using @font-face. We love Typekit. It's changing typography on the web.