About
Now| Next. Nothing Else.
“I’ve spent 16+ years showing up early and staying until the thing works.”
Not by design. By instinct. I'm the person who arrives early, when the thing is still being figured out, and builds the foundation that makes everything else possible. First UI Artist at EA Mobile when the studio was 20 people. Graphic and Menu Design across nearly 300 film releases at Madman Entertainment's Eastern Eye label. AI prototype work feeding directly into LLM pipelines at the frontier of what's being built right now.
Every time, the work was real. Every time, I gave everything to it.
The Pattern
There's a pattern I've watched repeat across two decades of working at the edge of film, games, and AI.
You arrive. You build the thing that makes the whole thing work. The project grows. The politics arrive. The people who couldn't build it start taking credit for it. And eventually you leave. Quietly, without a fuss. Because the craft stopped being the point.
I've made peace with that pattern. It taught me everything.
What it taught me most is this: the problem was never the work. The problem was the structure around the work. Augustine Studio exists so that pattern never has to repeat.
The Philosophy
Around the same time I was building AUG-Systems, a unified operational interface for skeleton-crew vessels, I stumbled onto the work of Rob Cobb. The concept designer behind the Nostromo interiors in Alien. The Semiotic Standard. The crew insignia. The functional visual language of an entire fictional civilisation.
I'd independently arrived at the same philosophy without knowing he existed.
Functional over decorative. Lived-in over pristine. No abstraction. No noise. Only what keeps you operational.
Cobb called it utilitarian futurism. I call it Now|Next. Nothing Else.
The idea is simple: you don't need a menu of options. You don't need settings panels and preference screens and nested navigation. You need the current state and the immediate next action. Exactly enough. Nothing more.
Every step refreshes. Drift has nowhere to live.
The Work
16+ years of working at the edge leaves marks.
FILM: Seven years at Madman Entertainment designing at a rate of three titles a month. The first 1.5 years on Anime, Dragon Ball GT and beyond. Then 5.5 years shaping the visual identity of Eastern Eye, how a generation of Australian film fans experienced Asian cinema. Kurosawa, Godzilla, J-horror, Korean new wave, Thai martial arts. My name is in the credits of Rashomon. Of Wild Zero. Of Ong-Bak. Of The Host.
GAMES: I was the first UI Artist at EA Mobile and helped build the studio from 20 people to 150. This was the frontier. Phones turning into computers in real time, the first iPad landing with no established design patterns to reference, and the first Free to Play monetisation models being figured out from scratch. Nobody had a rulebook. We wrote it. Dead Space. Mass Effect Infiltrator. Need for Speed. The Sims FreePlay. Later, at the frontier again, sole designer on Racino in the early days of Web3 gaming. A complex racing platform covering F1-level garage systems, marketplace integrations, and player customisation. Shipped from stealth to Beta over 18 months with 50+ documented features handed to dev.
ENTERPRISE: Three years as embedded lead designer at Vintrace, modernising a legacy SaaS platform for the wine industry from the ground up. Convinced the business to commit to a full platform uplift over incremental fixes, which contributed directly to an acquisition. At Coles Group, extended the Android design system to increase developer velocity by 60% across a retail app serving millions of weekly shoppers.
AI: At Appen, directed design on a platform unifying three business units into a single AI data collection system. 100,000+ global contributors across four time zones. Built a remote validation framework using their own gig-economy platform that cut testing costs and removed timezone barriers entirely. At Mercor, shipped 100+ product prototypes in an air-gapped environment feeding directly into Anthropic's LLM training pipeline and came away with a clear picture of where human-AI interfaces need to go. Not fragmented products. Not bolt-on features. A unified operating layer. Modular. Sequenced. Lean.
That's what AUG-Systems is. That's what the OS underneath it will be.
NOW: Augustine Studio is how I do my best work. The design philosophy is mine. The visual language is mine. The system I'm building, a generative OS that sequences the right tools into existence based on what's needed at this moment, then refreshes, is mine. The goal is always the same: work that's actually operational. No drift. Done properly, whoever needs it done.
Now|Next. Nothing Else.
Jeremy Doekes Founder, Augustine Studio Melbourne, Australia
Designed products for
AGL
Appen
Apps-Core
Black Magic Design
Madman Ent.
Racino (Marbula One)
Telstra
Two Bulls
VHS (ZED Run)
vintrace
Coles Group
Datto: Commerce
Electronic Arts
GE Capital (Latitude)