Designers on a Mission
Here to save you from bad UX
We strive to make people’s lives easier by designing satisfying interactions that help bridge the human/computer divide.
How we got the name
Why we called ourselves ‘Pencil and Paper’
We start with these basic materials to build elegant & rich designs…using Pencil & Paper sets the scene for design especially well.
Capturing Complexity
Drawing lets us understand and communicate complexity.
High Tech / Low Tech
High tech solutions can be borne from very basic materials.
Creating Possibility
With Pencil and Paper, the opportunities are boundless. The only limit is the space on your page.
Iterate Rapidly
When you can erase your ideas just as easily as create them, you don’t marry yourself to ideas you’re too invested in.
Meet our Founder
Ceara Crawshaw, CEO
Ceara was introduced to UX design through science communications and grew her skillset in the biotech enterprise software space originally. Her love of biology and living systems comes through in her design work as well as her artwork.
After Ceara earned a biology degree in Victoria then relocated to London, UK to launch her career in science communications. It was through that work that she was introduced to user experience design, and immediately reoriented to establish herself in the design field.
She became established in UX Design on an agile product team, from there she struck out on her own, working on a wide variety of domains and contexts. Now she’s the founder of Pencil & Paper in the beautiful technology hub, Victoria, BC.
What makes us Special?
How we stand out from the crowd.
We are not all things to all people – this is what makes us great at what we do.
We’re specialists in two ways:
1. We only do user experience design (not web development, SEO, marketing) – this perspective allows us to be more focused and simply better at our craft than if we were trying to do everything at the same time.
Instead, we have a select few companies we recommend to our clients who work in SEO, branding, web development and app development.
2. Sticking to our areas of focus – we’ve honed in on areas that we are good at, interested in and that we are positioned to succeed in. That’s why we’ve defined our areas of focus as: Enterprise Software, Employee UX, FinTech, BioTech, & Startups.
We love complexity and manage it exceedingly well – whether it’s software complexity, domain complexity or user-related complexity (ex. making behaviour changes).
We’re up to the challenge of understanding scenarios, software architecture, company culture, domain information and basically all of the details so that we can figure out where the opportunities for simplification and communication lie in an experience. You know those things that you’ve gone over and over a million times internally and you don’t seem to get anywhere? That’s where we shine.
We love collaboration. There’s a status quo in the design consultancy space where designers distance themselves from their clients. We don’t believe in that, we believe that there’s a meaningful mixture of collaboration internally (you and us) and externally (with end users) that creates what we call ‘design magic’ – where we find that perfect balance of user-centred and business centred design solutions.
Hybrid Business Model
Our grand plan
We’re building this company intentionally to hybridize our business model, having both client work and a subscription product. In this way we’re able to create real value in our company and avoid the typical ‘agency madness’ that is caused by having solely project-based business model. (more details to come)
