About me

Creative lead. Content lead. Content designer. Experience designer. Copywriter. I’ve worn a few hats in the last 17 years. I’ve worked on hundreds of projects, designed thousands of experiences and written millions of words. But I’m not a typical creative. I’m a logical, pragmatic problem solver. I believe in data, evidence and sound rationale. I’m comfortable with complexity and I embrace constraints – because every business has them. I also believe that creativity lives between the parenthesis of a project’s constraints. I’m an advocate of team diversity, believe wholly in customer-first experiences and am savvy enough to (always) blend the needs of the user, the business objective and the aspiration of the brand. As a creative lead, most of my time is spent solving content and user experience problems – often for large companies wrestling with digital transformation. My job is to definitively understand the problem, define the strategy, design the solution and lead the teams who bring the experiences to life. I’ve spent the last few years working with banks. Before that it was automotive and telcos. Clients: Nationwide, Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC, Barclays, RBS, McLaren Automotive, Volvo Trucks, Volkswagen, Vodafone, EE, Orange. Agencies: Publicis.Sapient, AKQA, Ogilvy, Leo Burnett, Tribal Worldwide, Fjord …

QuestionsProjectsExperienceTeam

Projects

• 1

  Volvo TrucksVolvo is creatively brave. When I started working with them they'd dangled their CEO off a crane, trained a hamster to drive a quarry truck and commissioned the most viewed YouTube clip in automotive history - the one with the rubber-legged Belgian doing the splits between two trucks.

Work history

Content StrategistFjord London
Jun 2018London, United KingdomFreelance
Freelance content strategist and content designer on insurance mindsets and the future shape of retail projects.
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Head of ContentNationwide Building Society
Jun 2016 - Apr 2018Bristol, United KingdomFreelance
Nationwide set up its Experience Design Studio in 2016. My job was to create a Society-wide content strategy, build a 40-strong content team and redesign the end-to-end production processes. It was a wonderful challenge. Changing people, culture, process and measurement is difficult in large organisations. But not impossible. Macro level content thinking, collaboration across departments, platforms and channels, dedicated content design resource and the introduction of agile delivery processes changed the Society’s approach to content. It improved quality, enhanced the customer experience and strengthened the brand experience. Streamlining the production process increased speed of delivery – and helped reduce associated production costs by up to 70%.

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Skills

• Experience Design
• Content Design
• Creative Direction
• Creative Leadership
• Content Strategy
• Copywriting
• User-centered Design
• Information Architecture
• Team Management
• Mentoring

Education

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BEng Mechanical EngineeringThe University of Strathclyde
Jun 1988Glasgow, United Kingdom
Some people are left brain. Some are right. I guess I'm both. I can do hard sums. I can solve problems. I understand logic and I'm comfortable with complexity. I also earn my living as a creative. Guess I'm just lucky.