Meet the team: UI designer Luke Brennan

Alison Visser: What do you do at Annertech? 

Luke Brennan: Officially I’m a User Interface – or UI – designer. My role encompasses UI design, user experience (UX) design, concept design, art direction, copywriting, marketing graphics and motion. 

As a UI designer I design websites as part of the Annertech team. I generally join projects at the kick-off stage and work with the client, a project manager and a tech lead in card sorting workshops. We then develop a UX design which contains all the functionality and interactions of the site, before creating a high fidelity user interface design. 

Once the project moves into the build phase I move to quality assurance and offer guidance on layout and interaction. 

Luke and his dog, Buddy, who follows him wherever he goes.

Alison: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? 

Luke: I grew up in Bray, Co. Wicklow, but currently live in Drimnagh, Dublin. I always loved art, drawing, painting, graphical things and visual culture. Eventually I studied Visual Communication Design at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Dun Laoghaire. 

After college, in 2012, I moved to the Netherlands and lived there for six years – in Groningen for two years and Amsterdam for four. 

In 2019 I moved to Toronto, where I rode out most of the pandemic. I returned to Ireland in 2021 and began working with Annertech a year later. 

Alison: What are your interests outside of work? 

Luke: I started drawing again during the pandemic, practising every day, and I love it. I like to make typographic illustrations, sometimes posters for social or civil advocacy. 

I love music (hip-hop, jazz, trad), comics, movies and my dog Buddy. 

Buddy often joins Luke on the job – and sometimes makes an on-screen appearance during video calls.

Alison: Can you tell us a bit about Buddy? 

Luke: Buddy is a Parson Russell Terrier, so imagine Eddie from the TV series Frasier. He’s five years old and I got him from a shelter when he was two. 

He has the loudest bark of any dog I’ve ever known, which he uses to express his excitement at seeing or hearing any other dog, people with bags or buggies, lawnmowers, cats, and pigeons. 

He’s very playful and boisterous, loves the dog park, and loves to be in on the action so he follows me literally everywhere I go.

Alison: What does a typical work day look like? 

Luke: I like to start as early as I can, as I find morning time better for creative work, usually with three or four coffees and some cereal bars. 

Then I work through my to-do list of sites to be designed or QAd (quality assured), other visual assets that might be needed, or hop on a couple of video calls. 

I try to avoid context switching as much as possible, and take occasional breaks to throw the ball for Buddy. 

Alison: Have you always designed websites? How did you get into this line of work? 

Luke: No, as a kid I drew and painted and wanted to be an artist but when I applied to art college they thought I had an aptitude for design so that’s what I chose. 

So I started out in print design and motion graphics, but in 2014 I got my first dedicated UI designer job and enjoyed it so much it became my focus.

Some of Luke’s notes and sketches.

Alison: What was the first website you designed? 

Luke: The first website I designed was after getting my first job in Amsterdam and it was a kind of cruise-quiz wizard for a Dutch cruise holiday company. 

Because I came from a more print-based background it was definitely a steep learning curve. But I was lucky enough to work under a fantastic art director named Niels who always kept a cool head and taught me an awful lot. 

Alison: What do you love most about your job? 

Luke: I love getting the opportunity to design accessible websites, especially when they contain information where there is a responsibility to the general public. 

I really enjoy the objective of trying to create something that is beautiful and is also as informative as possible for the user. I keep a phrase from Enzo Mari on a yellow post-it above my desk: “Design is only design if it communicates knowledge.”

Alison: Was there a favourite project that you worked on? 

Luke: There are multiple Annertech projects I’ve really enjoyed. Zero Emission Vehicles Ireland (ZEVI) was a particular favourite. We had a client that was very welcoming of creative direction and ended up with a sleek but impactful site. 

The aim of the new website was to make it easy for people to get information about switching to electric vehicles. Luke's gorgeous design ensures that it's also easy on the eye. 

Alison: Is there anything quirky about yourself that you’d be willing to share? 
Luke: Over the past five years I’ve returned to drawing, by which I mean practicing consistently. The margins of my work notes tend to be filled with doodles of superheroes (see image above). 

I also love making colourful graphics, animations, and social advocacy design for causes I care about. For example, during the pandemic I made lots of graphics encouraging people to be safe. 

An example of a series of posters that Luke designed during the Covid-16 pandemic.

Alison: You mentioned accessibility. This is a huge focus of Annertech’s, as we build accessibility into our projects from the beginning, so how do you go about ensuring that a website is accessible from a design perspective? 

Luke: In order to design an accessible website I try to design accessibly. By which I mean implementing some rules of thumb to do with legibility of typography, sentence width, line height, negative space, etc; by adhering to the latest best practices for accessibility, and trying to be purposeful in the delivery of information. 

All content and colour combinations are also checked for contrast or other visibility issues during the design process. And then our accessibility expert checks everything once again after that before anything is built. 

Alison: What do you like least about your job? 

Luke: Interacting with Excel, it’s my kryptonite. That’s just a small joke. Actually, there really isn’t much. I love being part of the Annertech team, and I love my role within the company. I get to be creative and also contribute to websites that help people. 

I guess being fully remote has a downside of less socialising with your colleagues, and even though I really enjoy being remote there’s something that can’t quite be replicated there.