PROJECTS
REDUCING ORDER QUERIES
Reducing customer effort and Customer Care costs by increasing users confidence at every stage of their order.
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Express & Daily Star Apps
Building a new and engaging native experience to increase traction and commercial targeting with our mobile audiences.
CHECK IT OUTMost of my work is design leadership for enterprise solutions which are not publicly available or are subject to security restrictions.
I am happy to discuss my approach and contributions to these projects.
LEADERSHIP
• Recruitment and development of many talented designers at all levels across product, UX and creative.
• Product design leadership (EMEA head) - Strategy and experience-first, AI enabled design delivery - Cognizant RFPs and clients.
• Succesful design delivery across numerous Cognizant client engagements - FCA, RAF, Network Rail.
• Building research-led product design methodologies and staffing as well as responsibilties and developmemnt matrices for design and research team at Just Eat for Business.
• Developing design system, process and libraries to enable swift, iterative delivery within product, design and engineering teams at Just Eat for Business
• Establishing in-house digital creative service for commercial Creative Solutions team at Northern & Shell producing rich-creatives for multi-media campaigns.
How I got here
I’ve had the good fortune of working with many great layout, creative and product designers, editors, product managers, CTOs, developers, sub-editors, marketing and sales execs and late-night security staff, all of whom have guided me in one way or another.
My early agency experience gave me a solid grounding in meticulous form and stationary layout and I learned the importance of a steady scalpel. A real education was seeing the nurturing of relationships built on trust and insights between clients (including the PGA and Ryder Cup), our team and local printers, and the power of finding the passion points of a brand to reflect their values to their customers.
It was a great time for magazines when I moved to publishing. They had bigger budgets back in the day so as I designed the pages our art-directors were on photoshoots encasing Carhartt jeans in blocks of ice and editors sent interns to buy their shoes as they smoked fancy fags and said 'no' a lot. Aspiration and tight layouts were the order of the day driven by the vision of bold, highly skilled, risk-taking creatives.
My first taste of newspapers was art-directing special projects at The Times. The Titanic supplement, which I researched and edited by chopping up scans of the original 1912 papers in Photoshop, is still one of the highlights of my career so far and opened the door for me to work with many top-notch editorial designers, writers and production staff who get the papers out every morning without fail.
‘Is it crisp and sexy and full of impact?’ was the mantra of the best night editor I ever worked with and I was humbled by the intuitive but well-structured story-telling skills of my talented and hugely experienced tabloid colleagues. Tabloid pages are perhaps the closest print cousin of web SEO and the art of drawing of readers attention through often tawdry, but sometimes era-defining events, combining imagery with words and space to engage them from their first glance to the last period remains a tantalising challenge with every narrative I’m presented with.
When the Express and Daily Star digital titles were given the investment to grow I jumped at the chance to get involved and established the digital editorial team for both titles. I employed a small but punching team who covered the desk 365 days a year as the editorial team expanded from 10 to 110, growing our market share rapidly.
Having created graphic, map, image rendering and composition styles and trained our journalists to powerfully present their stories through ongoing workshops I began working with our brilliant Director of Digital Content on strategies to drive readers through the site. Focussing on second and third page views we developed our recommended story components, image galleries and later video consumer journeys to drive editorial KPIs. My passion for UX was secured.
Inevitably, I moved to product to oversee design for both the Express and Daily Star titles, possibly the most rewarding move I've ever made! With an ambitious product manager, great engineers and much graft we again realised industry bucking growth for editorial, commercial and programmatic advertising teams at Express Newspapers.
As we worked to hit punchy commercial and editorial targets myself and the head of digital magazine design began working more closely with our creative solutions team and established what was essentially a small in-house digital, rich-media agency. Working in collaboration with the existing print design team we provided a multi-media opportunity for many large clients including Wilco and Halfords. It was a huge learning experience to leverage all customer touch-points and the possibilities (and limitations) of digital creative and ad formats.
Following much change I moved to lead the Product Design team at City Pantry, a B2B food delivery marketplace that had been recently acquired by Just Eat. The teams and company goals were equally impressive and I learned more in the first few months there than I could have imagined.
Working with a hugely engaged product and engineering team I recruited a team of designers who went on to work autonomously within defined teams (or squads), ensuring alignment through process, principles and rituals that meant our teams were all pointed in the same direction. They were also essential contributors to a design system that that encouraged creativity with shared values and effective, scalable use of components and styles.
Our work continues to drive growth within a highly competitive market, providing real value to our broad customer base who range from small companies to enterprise organisations, prioritising their needs to realise our ambitious business goals.
