Welcome to ron@2birds.org

Ron Bird is an independent IT architect specialising in conceptualising windowing, web, and PDA interactive products. After training at Central St. Martin's School of Art, Ron spent his formative design years at Xerox with their Human Factors User Interface team. Here he evolved the development of interfaces by using sketch illustrations, these later evolved into animations.

Many concepts are quicker and easier to understand as animations, they can also be used to try and refine concepts without expensive programming. These have been very popular among all his clients.

For the past 3 years Ron has been consulting exclusively with Nokia where he has been acting as their concept designer for Nokia’s new camera and gallery for the Nokia 'N' series of camera phones. This exclusivity has now ended.

Previously Ron was consulting with Hutchison, the 3G mobile phone company now called '3' where he delivered the UI for browser side messaging, contacts, calendar, plus Chat and IM.

Ron has worked with clients such as:

Tarantella Inc. a NASDAQ listed software company, where he was their Creative Director.

Symbian, the communications company, where he helped develop the context sensitive version of the Quartz product interaction. He was also involved with the Bluetooth implementation and development team.

Silver Platter, the medical data base company, where he helped redesign their search engine interface and interaction.

Siemens, he wrote their user interface and interaction specification document, hailed by its review board as the finest they had seen.

TIAG, in Hong Kong Ron lead the architecture design for the professional stockmarket trading product for The Stockmarket Channel, doing the same in Indonesia for Antara. In Japan lead the architecture design for Yamachi's domestic stockmarket trading web product.

IBM Where he worked on the 'watercress project' a forerunner of OS2. It was here he became fully conversant with CUA (Common User Access) Guidelines to which all computer programs comply (to various degrees of success) no matter what their operating system.

At BT Ron worked on a multitude of programs the largest being the Concert user interface and interaction specification documentation.

Reuters the financial services company, where he set up the graphical user interface design team.

He has also worked with a Japanese company developing an interface for digital camers.

Ron has given talks formally at Multimedia '90 and HCI2002, and sponsored design talks in London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Informally at CHI '90 (TheComputer Human Interaction conference Seattle, USA) 'in flight' entertainment systems. Ron was the user interface designer for the world's first such system with Plessey Avionics, shown at the Paris Air Fair 1989.

He has lectured at:
The Royal College of Art
Middlesex University
Coventry University
Imperial College, London.

His work has also featured in Virginia Howlett's book 'Visual Interface Design for Windows'. John Wiley & Sons Inc.
Virginia Howlett was Director of Visual Design at Microsoft where she managed the visual design of Windows 3.1, NT and 95.

He is a fellow of:

The Chartered Society of Designers

an
Associate Member of the Ergonomics Society