I lead design at DHD, and I still fuss over the kerning.
Northern Ireland
I'm Daniel Young, Head of Design at DHD, a creative agency that does strategy, design, digital and film. I lead our brand and digital work and sit on the senior leadership team.
Most of my week goes on the questions before the design. Who is this brand for? What should it say, and what should it stop saying? Then I make it, with the team, down to the detail.
AI is part of that. I use it for research, first drafts, production and checks, and I build my own apps and tools with it. Building things taught me where it helps and where it gets in the way.
I also help brands get ready for it. More and more of a brand's words are now written with AI tools, by marketing teams, agencies and the client's own staff. If the brand isn't written down in a way those tools can follow, it drifts. So alongside guidelines, I write tone of voice skills and brand.md files that keep it on track.
Most of the work happens before anyone opens Figma.
01 How I use AI
Four rules I keep to.
- 01
Machines draft, people decide.
AI can give me twenty options. It can't tell me which one is right for the people the brand is for.
- 02
Speed buys thinking time.
The hours AI saves go back into the idea and the details, not into making more of the same.
- 03
Say where it was used.
I tell clients where AI helped and where it didn't, so nobody is guessing. This site does the same at the end of each note.
- 04
A person checks everything.
Every output is read, used and tested by me before it leaves my desk.
02 CV
Experience
Full CVHead of Design
DHD (David Henderson Design)
I lead design across strategy, identity and digital, and sit on the senior leadership team. I'm leading DHD's own brand messaging, set up shared folder structures and file naming across our departments, and ran the team's first workshop on working with Claude.
Software For All
Brand guidelines
Guidelines for Workplus and Software NI, with an architecture that puts the two best-known brands first.
Chestnutt Holiday Parks
Tone of voice, social
Wrote the tone of voice for a family-run holiday parks business and lead its social visuals.
Myrtlefield House
Brand and web
Brand identity and website, from logo variants and colour to content hierarchy and navigation.
Texam
Website
Website, planned and tracked by phase.
Chapter & Verse
iPhone and iPad
Bible reading, study notes and shared prayer points, with iCloud sync. SwiftUI and SwiftData.
Lights Out Belfast
Web
A 3D map of Belfast's empty buildings, lit by the real sun and weather.
Stripes, Cadence, Glowline Studio
iPhone and web
A lawn care log, a focus timer and a pattern generator.
Figma
Brand systems, decks, UI and email signatures.
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SwiftUI
This site and the apps above.
Claude
Research, drafts, code and checks. I write and maintain the skills our team uses, from file naming to tone of voice.
Away from the desk
I'm usually out walking Marlo, our golden retriever, who has opinions about every hedge in the county. When I'm not, I'm building small apps for things I care about, like Chapter & Verse.
I'm also working slowly through a personal series of abstract landscapes, one for each of the 66 books of the Bible.
Sound like a fit? Say hello.
Northern Ireland
Get in touch