Adam Burleigh
Product designer, with illustration and animation
- adam.burleigh@icloud.com
- linkedin.com/in/adamburleigh
- adamburleigh.com
- Manchester, England · Remote
Summary
I’m a product designer with a background in illustration and animation, and over 10 years’ experience designing mobile apps (iOS and Android) and web products across travel, retail, food and drink, student accommodation and game-based psychometric assessments.
Alongside UX and UI design, I bring interaction design, micro-animation, illustration and gamification. I work across the full product lifecycle, from discovery through to developer handoff and post-launch iteration.
Core skills
Product & UX
End-to-end product design, user-centred design (UCD), information architecture (IA), user journey mapping, discovery, UX auditing, wireframing, accessibility (WCAG 2.2), gamification
UI, motion & illustration
High-fidelity UI, native iOS and Android app design, design systems & component libraries, micro-animations, Lottie animation, interactive prototyping, responsive design, illustration and game art
Process & strategy
Cross-functional collaboration, Agile/Scrum methodologies, developer handoff, stakeholder engagement, competitor analysis
Tools
Figma, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro
Experience
Apadmi : UX designer
Jan 2023 – Oct 2026 · App design agency
Delivered product design across agency clients and new business pitches, spanning UX, UI, illustration and animation depending on each project’s needs.
- Mapped the end-to-end journey for a global travel company and found the “dead time” where its app went unused, then designed AI-assisted planning, pre-trip and in-trip concepts for iOS. Case study
- Designed a consolidated bookings and earnings view for a holiday letting platform, bringing income, occupancy and notices into the calendar owners used every day. Case study
- Audited a fashion and homeware retailer’s shopping app against UX patterns and WCAG guidance, then fixed touch-accessibility issues on its product listing and detail pages within strict limits on change.
- Audited a global quick-service food brand’s app and designed more on-brand concepts for loyalty, gamification and a highly visual ordering flow.
- Designed support journeys for a student accommodation provider, with visual timelines showing the status of each maintenance or parcel request against service-level agreements.
- Illustrated and animated for clients: a reskinned rewards game for a pub and hospitality brand, marketing assets and feature graphics, and corporate-event videos in After Effects and Premiere Pro.
Arctic Shores : Illustrator to UX designer
Apr 2015 – Dec 2022 · Game-based hiring assessments
Joined as employee number five, hired as the digital illustrator, and grew into UX as the product became a SaaS platform. Worked across level design, concept art, animation, character design, UI and UX for six gamified mobile assessments, partnering with the science team to turn validated paper-based psychometric tests into engaging games without compromising test validity. Case study
- Reskinned the core game across six art directions, from playful to corporate, to suit different markets, with regular science reviews so the measurement underneath never changed.
- Moved the game art from hand-painted Photoshop files to vector SVGs in Figma and built component libraries for the UI and game assets, making client rebrands faster and the artwork more consistent.
- Built a branding tool into the SaaS platform that let clients recolour the UI and illustrations and add their logo, with guardrails that automatically kept WCAG contrast whatever colours they chose.
- Helped design the SaaS platform that let employers set up assessments and track candidate results themselves, moving candidates from an app download to a link that opened in the browser.
- Designed onboarding for employers and candidates around user personas, including a visual level-selection and progress screen with micro-animations that showed candidates how far they’d come and what was left.
- Set up a fail-fast review process with the science team, using rough sketches, quick notes and short discussions, then documented it in wikis and walked the wider business through it on company-wide calls.
- Contributed to assessments taken by more than 3 million candidates, for over 100 employers in more than 40 countries.
Education
Illustration with Animation (2:1)
Manchester Metropolitan University · Sep 2010 – Jul 2013
Certifications
Professional Scrum Master I (PSM I)