The Design Practice of Maxwell White

I’m a designer with 10+ years of experience with groups incl. Activision, Emirates, IBM, Lego, Shell, and United. Next up, I’m joining Monta as Senior Product Designer to help improve electric vehicle infrastructure.

I landed in design in New Zealand after taking a digital communications undergrad. My first hands-on project was for a local Italian restaurant; Buon Venuti. I hand-coded their website, and, to my surprise, they decided to keep it. Their purchase wasn't just of the website but of my educational journey, too—I was stepping away from formal education and into the deep end of the design pool.

I took on contracts with a naive boldness, often punching above my weight in what I agreed to do. I saw these not as insurmountable obstacles but as stepping stones, a chance to learn while doing—the best education for me.

The attraction of Europe eventually proved irresistible, and I followed the well-known path of many a Kiwi to London. Over the next decade, I worked my way to a great position, managing a team of 12 designers at GoodNotes. But it was less of the hands-on design I loved and different from how I'd envisioned the role.

Three design systems, countless iterations and hundreds of releases later, I call Copenhagen home, and I’m thrilled to be part of Monta’s mission, helping make electric vehicle charging as intuitive as plugging in your phone at night.

My guiding principle in user experience has often aligned with Richard Thaler’s wisdom, “If you want people to do something, make it easy.” And that's what I intend to do.

Selected works

A selection of work, in visual form. Please note that due to legal constraints, I’m unable to showcase many of the projects I’ve had the privilege of contributing to.

Bluebird Private Office
Bluebird Private Office is a lifestyle service for ultra high net worth individuals. I designed and built their online presence.
Donkey Republic
An unsolicited look at how the rental industry could redesign upsells e.g., theft insurance, during checkout flows.
Hive Home
Rapid prototyping; the first pages made with ‘Honey’ design system inside Sketch. Testing the limits of the components.
Hive Home
While at Hive, I launched up with ‘Honey’, a design system to help designers and engineers work together using design tokens.
Shell
LubePro Global version brings LubePro to iPad—a more professional experience during site assessments.
Emirates
Art direction for an Emirates package holiday brand offering long-haul travel aimed at over 50s. Working within the many constraints of airline or tourism board brand and marketing guidelines.
Shell
I led User Interface Design to deliver traceability of bottles, cartons and pallets across Hong Kong, Germany and Spain.
GoodNotes
At GoodNotes, I had the privilege of providing support to a team of 12 talented designers—remotely. Image by the talented Camilla Cornwell.
Activision
I helped deliver more than 20,000 banners in 18 languages for the launch of Call of Duty Infinite Warfare across display, social and Comic Con.
Shell
A snapshot of components and styles from Shell MarketHub's Design System created in 2020.
Shell
A complete redesign of Shell MarketHub, a $19b B2B e-commerce platform. I was User Interface Design Lead, ensuring Shell's brand was pixel perfect.

“Maxwell is our design systems god.”

Anojan Sivaranjan

Product Designer, GoodNotes

Recently

I have relocated to Copenhagen, Denmark after almost a decade in the fast pace of London. I'm also doing the Daily UI challenge and posting it on Dribbble, but I don’t have time to do it daily. Of course.