I’m a design leader with 25+ years of experience building brands, products, and teams - starting at animation studios before shifting to advertising agencies and branding agencies and then to funded fintech scale-ups.

Today I’m Head of Design at ALT21, a Series A FX fintech, where I lead product transformation across client, partner, and internal platforms. My focus is simple: turn complexity into clarity.

That has meant:

• Redesigning onboarding to reduce completion time from 30 minutes to 10

• Building a scalable design system from the ground up

• Elevating product maturity during a funding round

• Aligning brand, UX, and business strategy into one coherent story

Before fintech, I built award-winning brand work for Coca-Cola, Vodafone, Sony and cultural figures including Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I’ve led creative studios, built marketplaces, shipped apps, and learned first-hand how hard scaling product really is.

Some ventures succeeded. Some folded.

Both were useful. I now specialise in leading design teams within scale-ups, building systems, culture, and clarity while staying close to craft. I speak regularly at events including Web Summit, The Next Web, Global Entrepreneurship Congress and Friends of Figma on topics including design leadership, creativity in regulated environments, and adapting to AI-accelerated workflows.

Comfort zones expire quickly in design. Curiosity shouldn’t.