Take 10 with... Alister Coyne

Take 10 with… Alister Coyne

The DA team want to support our community through these unprecedented times – something we kept coming back to is a focus on connection and community. So we want to do what we think DA does best, sharing ideas, inspiration and information and profiling our community.
With that in mind, we launched a new series Take 10 with… to do a pulse check on how you’re feeling, how you’re working, what you are missing, and what your hopes are for the future. We invited some of our friends, peers and the DA team to participate and we hope you enjoy these honest and candid profiles of Aotearoa designers today.

Introduce yourself: Hi I’m Alister Coyne – Director of Design at Auror. This is the view my team will see over the next month or so, in my laggy pixelated glory.

How did you get into design? Through skateboarding. David Carson was the Art Director for Transworld Skateboarding and design was more like art than design.

What do you love about design? Not only do we get to solve problems, we get to bring it to life with typography, grids and some bloody awesome ingenuity.

What or who inspires you? I’m always in awe of Pete Majari – Who made a movie poster every day for a year. 😍 https://amovieposteraday.tumblr.com/

How are you feeling right now? A lot calmer than last week! More hope and optimism this week which is reassuring.

Are you working right now, if so what does your work from home day look like?

I start work at 8:00am, get some focus time on a current project. I pop into a remote standup with the Marketing team at 8:45am, which is good for a bit of banter and to stay connected. I post an item from my study to our company #virtual-wfh Slack channel each morning. Today’s item is a handmade book by Lang Leav, a novelist and poet, formerly known as Akina. I’ll check in with the design team and see how they’re going. From there it’s remote meetings really. I’ll do a 5km run to get out of the house and stay fit. Lunch with the family, it’s nice to be able to spend time with the kids!

I’m currently working on some new functionality for our platform to help our users to connect the dots when known repeat suspects are entered into our platform, this will help police know where to focus their time.

What’s your one tip right now? Take one day at a time.

Tell us about your current workspace. I’ve got a great little triangle shaped study that is seperate from the rest of the house. It’s a good place to hang out with heaps of natural light.

Which local business are you going to miss most during our isolation period? We have the best fish and chips takeaway! It’s not something we eat a lot of but it’s sad to think that they may be closed for the next while.

What do you hope for the Aotearoa design community going forward? We are image makers and we have the ability to communicate in ways many are unable to. Let’s reshape the narrative to be more positive!