How I lead

Holding the standard

I’d rather say it up front than have you find it in the small print. I haven’t had formal direct reports. What I have done is hold the standard across everything a brand puts out, and make it possible for other people to contribute ideas and see them realised well.

I describe myself as an obsessive generalist. In an in-house team that matters, because the person holding the standard also needs to be able to pick up whatever needs doing and do it properly.

Making the brand easy to use

A standard that lives in one person’s head doesn’t scale, and it makes for a lot of messages asking “is this on brand?” At Vouch I designed and built Brand Hub with AI in Claude Code. It holds ten guideline sections and around 300 assets. It also has Flow, a conversational AI interface, so anyone in the company can check their work against the brand, get their copy reviewed or find the right asset without having to come and find me first.

Working through other people

At the Actuaries Institute I was 2IC and managed the team every Friday, because my manager worked four days. I also briefed and critiqued a senior freelance designer on retainer, and jointly managed the relationship with Ogilvy. When you’re giving feedback to someone with that much experience, you learn quickly to be specific about what isn’t working and why.

Teaching and upskilling

I’ve taught people the tools in most of my roles. At Macquarie Capital I founded an internal video and motion education programme. At amaysim I presented regularly to the design team on tools and workflows, and upskilled them in motion graphics. At DPE I consolidated the new brand guidelines into a living style guide and presented it to designers across the regional offices, which brought the new identity into consistent use.

In my first six months at Vouch I worked with two product designers, before they left the business. I mentored them more on visual and graphic design than on product design, and we’d talk through how to approach that kind of work. I enjoyed it more than I expected to, and it made me better at explaining decisions I’d been making instinctively for years.

Partners and creators

At Vouch I manage our external partners: a Webflow agency, an SEO agency and two creators. One six-month creator campaign produced around six product launch videos.

Most of the work with creators happens in the brief. It has to be tight enough to protect the brand and loose enough that the creator still sounds like themselves. If the brief flattens their voice, you’ve hired someone for their personality and then asked them to leave it at the door.

Working with leadership

At Vouch I report to the CEO and present to the exec team. Before that, at Macquarie Capital, I presented to the joint Heads as Lead Creative on the annual internal event.

I’ve also worked through brand and legal review at the Actuaries Institute, DPE and Macquarie Capital, always to sign-off timelines. Legal review teaches you to plan for it from day one. It rarely moves faster because the launch date is close.

Craft and care

At DPE everything digital had to meet WCAG 2.0. I took a course in making accessible PDFs, and I’m handy with contrast tools, probably more than is healthy. With Claude connected to Webflow, I’ve since fixed accessibility, engagement and readability issues across the whole Vouch website in one go, in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

I also build my own creative tools. There are more than ten so far, including a Remotion pipeline, Figma plugins and a carousel builder. AI has made my motion graphics work around three times faster, which mostly means more time for the parts that need a person.

Get in touch

The case studies show the work itself. If you’d like to talk about a role or a project, get in touch.