About

Maggie Appleton

Designer, anthropologist, and mediocre developer.

A Little Context

I sit at the intersection of design, anthropology, and web development. These three are at the core of everything I make. Combining them into a coherent career is a weird and ongoing challenge.

Titles and disciplines are fickle and fleeting. But my work fits under the umbrellas of design engineering, product design, and visual interface design. With some cultural analysis, writing, and visual illustration sprinkled on top.

I'm currently on maternity leave for the first half of 2025, and looking for a new role from September onwards. Here's what I've been up to for the last few years:

Lead Design Engineer at Normally
July 2024 - Jan 2025
A research and design studio building early stage AI prototypes for larger tech companies. I built zero-to-one prototypes in collaboration with other designers and backend engineers, focusing on front-end implementation and LLMs.
Founding Product Designer at Elicit
June 2022 - June 2024
Designed the initial version of Elicit, a research tool that uses language models to speed up the systematic review process for researchers and scientists.
Head of Design at HASH
Oct 2021 - July 2022
Worked on the initial interface and product vision for an open-source platform and protocol designed to make block-based editors (like Notion, Coda, etc.) interoperable, and improve the way we add semantic, structured data to the web.
Illustrator, Art Director, & UX Designer at Egghead
April 2016 - Sep 2021
Developer education company where I worked on illustrations and visual interface design. This role helped me create own robust process for visualising complex programming concepts through graphic design, metaphors, and cultural symbols.

On the side I create illustrated essays and visual explanations about programming and culture. I'm an advocate of digital gardening , end-user programming , and expanding our use of embodied cognition and conceptual metaphors in digital interfaces.

A Little History

I'm originally from London but grew up in international schools in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore.

I earned my undergraduate degree in cultural anthropology at a small, hippie, liberal arts college in the United States. While I adore anthropology, it's not terribly employable (unless you want to be an academic or a military advisor) and I promptly switched into freelance design and illustration to pay rent. I started developing my visual design skills at age 14 when I first bootlegged a copy of Photoshop to make my own skeuomorphic desktop wallpapers and icon sets, but never realised you could get paid for that.

In my early twenties I country-hopped while working through the early, ugly, awkward phase of my design sensibilities. I worked with web developers in Vietnam, trained with feature film illustrators in Los Angeles, and learned typography and brand design at creative agencies in Prague. I made a lot of hideous stuff, but figured out what I liked along the way.

In my late twenties I finally returned to London to become a more settled, “normal” adult, and have come to love the dull stability of home. I now live south of the river with my lovely husband and son.