Me in a nutshell.
I am an unshakable advocate for design.
I believe that good design can turn the mundane into something wonderful. And when combined with consideration, depth of thinking, an obsession with quality, and a sizable dose of play can lead to ground breaking and transformative change.
A proven leader and innovator I establish, build, and coach design teams who take vision to strategy, and concept to delivery. I keep those teams inspired through genuine excitement for design, a knack at seeing where things are headed, a keen eye for strategy, and a healthy level of considered disruption.
Starting my career straight out of school with zero experience I talked myself into a job in visual effects. I worked on features and advertising as a 3D artist and animator before transitioning onto software development, building the tools that make the movies. This was my introduction to design.
I then took time out to teach 3D animation and game physics. Teaching is difficult, and it taught me how hard but how pivotal leadership can be. And how providing inspiration, direction, and remaining authentic no matter the cost will tend to result in a team forming around you.
I was then invited to work in the culture sector, where I helped design and build complex and innovative galleries for the big London museums that discussed climate change, identity, information, mathematics, and biology. It is here, whilst being responsible for over 200 contractors and £150 million, where I learned how to combine management with leadership. And I also built some pretty fun things and got to drive a huge crane.
I then entered the world of agency life, as Creative Director for Reading Room (5 agencies, 3 continents) and then Deeson (a tiny startup agency) where I demolished and rebuilt the design practices so that they could be fast and fun again. I learned here what I’m good at. And I loved it.
And then I took a leap and accepted a job at a bank, with a brief to take a place riddled with bad legacy and no understanding of the customer and change how it thought and what it offered. It is here that I proved to myself what I can achieve, building a team that has continuously increased conversation rates on our primary journeys, that has introduced customer research and behavioural psychology, that has been described as “best in class” by external auditors (PWC and the FCA), and has taken over design for all four businesses within the group.
So in a nutshell, I am a customer focussed and commercially aware Head of Design able to apply learning and insights from multiple sectors, to excite and engage a broad set of stakeholders. I’m unconventional, able to be the irrational head in the rational room. I believe in the power of play, and I get a big kick out of getting stuff done.
I am now looking for an opportunity to help grow and mature a design team who can lead a business through the lens of design and the voice of the customer. I am specifically interested in areas where innovation, playfulness, and speed of delivery are critical to success.
But mainly, I want to work for Lego.
Recent experience
Vanquis Bank / Head of Design
April 2018 - PRESENT, London
I built and now lead the digital design team embedded within Vanquis Bank Ltd – an internal team of 8 backed up by an agency partner, we offer User Experience, User Interface, Service Design, Customer Research, and Behavioural Psychology services. We are responsible for the redesign and delivery of our new mobile apps, websites, application journeys, and internal CRM tooling. We also lead on customer understanding, data collection and analytics, and testing of all digital products across the 4 businesses.
- I built and embedded design capability within the business and wider group, from a single designer to a mature design team offering UX, UI, behavioural psychology, service design, content design, and customer research.
- Working directly with the Managing Director and Group CEO I co-created the group’s 5 year business strategy, and led the creation of the assets (animations, presentations, and websites) needed to tell the story to the Board of Directors.
- I saw the opportunity for and demonstrated our capability to consolidate and own design across the group’s four businesses, and put in place the team and technologies to do it. This led to realised savings of 12 FTE (~£780k per year), and a ~30% realised increase in design delivery.
- I own the group’s design principles. The philosophy, guidelines, and rules of design that we use across the four brands. These principles ladder up to a core understanding of who our customers are and how they use our services across the group, but also allow for differentiation across the brands where suitable.
- I led the implementation of the Content Square analytics platform. Between Content Square and Google Content Experiments my team tests and optimises this journey daily. In the last year this has led to identified profit increases of £417k per month, and has fed the IT backlog to implement the winning tests.
- Working alongside the Digital Products and Engineering teams I developed the business case for digital product replacement (mobile app, web, middleware, and banking platform) to ensure a stable set of technologies to build new customer experiences upon. This new project is underway and due to go live in December 2023.
- I led and delivered the new Vanquis brand identity and brand hub, creating a complete suite of assets and tooling for app, web, social, and email including our multi-brand design system.
- In partnership with our data analysis teams I own the predictive analytics workstream. This work identifies the behavioural patterns that tend to lead to poor customer outcomes, so that we may identify and then nudge individual customers away from detrimental behaviour and reward them when their actions will build their financial stability.
- I created the processes and tooling to enable the bank to understand the gaps in FG21/1 Vulnerable Customer and CP21/13 Consumer Duty compliance, and work with the wider business to help them find sustainable routes to ensure ongoing audit readiness.
- My team built and own the group-wide design system (Stitch), technology platform, and design tokenisation system. This multi-brand system enables UI and brand identity changes to go live across any channel, in any business, direct from design tools into customers hands, in real time. It’s amazing, I’m proud of this one.
- I am the public face of design, innovation, and customer insight for the bank. 18 events spoken at in 2021, 6 so far in 2022, and another 12 booked.
- I built and continue to grow relationships with external charity partners allowing us to test directly with a broad range of vulnerable customers.
- I have on boarded or managed the ongoing relationships with two of our external partners (Tall and Fablr) and worked directly with another four (AND, PWC, NOW, CGI).
- I have the highest retention rate of any team within the bank.
Deeson / Creative Director
January 2016 - March 2018
I joined Deeson to build design capacity in an agency that was failing to win new clients. The challenge given to me was “fix design, win us new work, you have a year.” It didn’t take very long. They had fantastic designers in place, all that was needed was to reframe what design is, change the way design worked, and bring back the fun and focus. So my goal quickly shifted to building a sustainable design team that could run itself with minimal management but ongoing leadership, so that I could focus on helping to fix the commercial side of the business.
- I set the creative direction for the agency, including brand, tone of voice, and proposition. This led to a restructure of the business, our proposition, and the clients we accepted. Our mission was clearer, our ability to attract and win new clients grew, and staff retention increased.
- I changed how we delivered design for our clients, from siloed and slow to engaging and fast paced. This increased design retention, sped up the process, and the output was higher quality.
- I rebuilt our sales process. I ditched the sales team and instead coached everyone in the agency on what proposals and pitches are. It allowed us to be more authentic – clients were meeting the actual people they’d be working with. In my first 11 months we won new clients with an identified value of over £1.8 million and through ongoing engagement a realised value of over £4.2 million.
- I mentored not just designers but engineers and project managers, and helped them move to larger roles within the agency. Out of this the agency’s strategy wing spun up, we were able to grow the UX capacity, we started to attract bigger clients, and the profit margins went up.
- My clients included The Royal Household, Science Museum, Imperial War Museum, Cancer Research UK, Barnardos, GDS, Cambridge Consultants, and University of Derby.
Reading Room / Creative Director
May 2013 - January 2016
Reading Room poached me at a Science Museum Late event. No interview, no CV, just an invitation to join the agency and see what I “could do if I was surrounded by people and money.” There was almost no scope to change our processes, so I had to change how we applied them. I forced new ways of thinking by introducing new technologies and tools. I won new clients that needed different types of output. I hired younger and less established designers and developers. This was a role I was not ready for, but I learned so much and I got lucky. Roughly 6 months after I joined I was promoted to Creative Director, then made a Company Director. And then we sold the agency.
- Introduced new technologies and ways of working, moving from a rigid waterfall project process to an agile and iterative product process. This sped up delivery massively which allowed us to spend more time in the discovery and design phase.
- Scaled design in the business substantially, and moved design from a standalone group to being part of the product and project teams, leading to an increase in design quality and staff retention.
- Managed and mentored 26 designers across 5 offices and 3 continents.
- Led on the largest implementation globally (at the time) of Sitecore and Sitecore CXP, for the National Museums of Science & Industry. This project was one of the first to use Sitecore Personalisation, and was used by the Science Museum to generate web and in-gallery content on the fly, score engagement, and provide analytics on visitor interest.
- Led on the largest implementation globally (again, at the time) for Kentico CMS for Kingspan Group. This project consolidates 248 websites and content management systems into one platform, whilst integrating with associated point of sale, Solidworks and Autocad software, and global (local council) planning portal integration. Effectively enabling the largest supplier of building materials globally to manage all 200+ brands and 2 million+ products from one platform, in any language, in ways that meet the regulations of each operating country.
- Also part of the Kingspan work, I led the team that built and maintained the Kingspan Design System. Multi-channel, multi-brand, multi-language, multi-culture. This design system is still the largest I’ve worked on, with over 20,000 fully adaptable and responsive components. Built in Sketch with a custom plugin to allow direct design-to-code, this was I think one of the earliest implementations of design tokens.
- Consulted for the strategy business (Reading Room Specialist Consultants) on digital innovation and creative use of technology. I wrote the digital strategy for Arts Council England, City & Guilds, and Edinburgh Napier University. I also co-wrote the digital growth strategies for Nationwide and Compare The Market.
- I changed parts of our new business process specifically to help attract the culture sector. This led to an initial ~£2.2 million year on year growth of new business wins.
- Following on from this success I led on the growth of our government and non-profit work. We won GDS, The National Archives, Government Legal Department, Kew Gardens, and NHS contracts.
- My clients included Volkswagen, Taylor Wimpey, Kingspan, Škoda, The Royal Household, Science Museum, V&A, Design Museum, City & Guilds, Nationwide, the Ministry of Defence, GDS, The National Archives, Edinburgh Napier University, Arts Council, and Metro Bank.
References
You can contact any of these people at any time. If you'd like to speak to my current manager, I can arrange that.
Guy Utley, Founder and Creative Director, Tall Agency.
guy@tall.agency | 07747 610011
Jade Whyton, Product Owner Mobile App, NewDay.
| 07960 621754
Rhys Hicks, UX Researcher, SumUp.
rhyshickswork@gmail.com | 07923 369411
Dave Coakley, my coach. He knows me better than most.
| 07946 470699
Mark Howard, Head of IT Delivery, The Royal Household
mark.howard@royal.uk | 07968 711565
Dave Archbold, Product Owner Mobile App, Vanquis.
dave.archbold@gmail.com | 07740 344046