The story
Splits his time between delivery management and the motion work that gives a product its feel.
Tom has an unusual pairing of responsibilities, and it is deliberate. He runs delivery — timelines, risk, the weekly view of whether we are actually going to make it — and he also does the motion design. Both jobs are about timing.
The delivery half
Most agency projects do not slip in the last week. They slip in week three, quietly, and nobody says anything until week nine. Tom's whole method is making that visible early: a plan with explicit dependencies, a weekly honest read on each one, and a conversation the moment something turns amber rather than red.
The motion half
His rule for interface motion is that it has to be doing a job: showing where a thing came from, what is loading, or what just changed. Motion that exists to look expensive is the first thing he cuts, and he is ruthless about performance — every animation ships with a reduced-motion path because a vestibular disorder is not an edge case.
- Owns the plan, the dependencies and the weekly risk read
- Runs the client's weekly review, with the same slides every time
- Designs and builds interface motion and product video
- Ships a reduced-motion alternative for every animation
Nobody has ever complained that an animation was too short. — Tom Whitfield
In their words
A deadline is not a wish. It is arithmetic you either did or did not do at the start.