Stephen Hutchings is a multi‑disciplinary designer, with broad interests and experience designing fonts, data visualisations, user interfaces and generative art.

I sit at the intersection of design and front-end development. Equally comfortable with creative and technical work, I lead projects from design through to implementation. I typically work alone on small to medium size projects where my expertise across multiple disciplines allows me to take a unified approach.

Part of my work involves looking at the details of digital experiences – the things you read, click, search, tap, drag, delete, edit. These basic interactions are themselves composed of many intricate pieces that need to be carefully designed and built. But my job is about more than just details. I’m also responsible for shaping them into coherent, satisfying user experiences that best meet the needs of organisations and the people they serve.

With more than a decade of varied experience working with agencies, start-ups and think tanks, I’ve helped all sorts of clients build all sorts of things. My most recent work includes visualising hundreds of thousands of data points across seventeen years of opinion polls. I have also just completed a family of bespoke typefaces for a well-known internet platform.

In fact, I moonlight as a type designer, and a number of my fonts are available on this site. You can find a mix of other side projects here, too. If you like word games, try Shortlist. And if you need a way to build and share simple online tools, TakeyMakey might be perfect for you. Or try out Night Owl, a new static site generator.

If you are interested in working together, please get in touch.

Selected previous work

The Asia Power Index ranks major players in the region across diverse measures. In 2019 I rebuilt the site, drastically increasing site speed and user engagement. At the same time I conducted a thoughtful design update to better showcase the index as a best in class tool of its kind.

In 2021 the Judith Neilson Institute set out to capture the state of News in Asia. The result was twelve long-form chapters exploring different themes. It was my job to organise them into a compelling package that drew out the insights from each chapter and encourage readers to take a deep dive into the region.

As design and front-end lead for the then emerging start-up, I designed and helped to build the front-end for edapp.com, as well as their learning engine, mobile application, and client management portal. The branding and design direction that were established at the time remain in use today.

Each year the Lowy Institute Poll surveys Australian’s attitudes to world events. In 2020, I helped transform their annual release of results into a repository covering the full history of the poll. This involved distilling multivariate responses from diverse demographies across hundreds of questions into clear insights, automatically charting results based on the shape of the data.