Andy Budd
As a renown Design Leader and agency CEO, Andy helps companies like Virgin Holidays, John Lewis and Penguin Random House with issues of customer experience, product strategy, and digital transformation.
Andy’s role at Clearleft is to set strategy and vision, promote the value of design, and help our clients realise their digital potential. Andy is very active in the day-to-day running of the company, managing our leadership team, setting company culture, and looking after the happiness and wellbeing of our 30+ staff.
Andy is a designer at heart, having spent over 20 years in the field. He loves using his knowledge of design, technology, and human behaviour to influence product strategy. As such, Andy is in his element when working alongside board members and their management teams.
In his early career Andy helped pioneer the field of Web Standards through his work, his blog (one of the highest trafficked in the UK at the time), and the publication of his best selling book – CSS Mastery. Later, Andy helped popularise the field of UX design, setting up the UKs first dedicated UX agency, along with it’s first and arguably best UX conference.
When he’s not running the company or managing our creative output, Andy can be found sharing his wealth of knowledge at conferences around the world like SXSW, An Event Apart and The Next Web. He also curates the UX London and Leading Design conferences. In 2011, Andy co-founded the Brighton Digital Festival, a citywide celebration of digital culture attracting 40,000 visitors and over 190 events. These are just some of the reasons his company has won Netmag Agency of the Year on several occasions, and he’s appeared on both the Wired 100 and BIMA 100 lists.
Never happier than when he’s diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor and retired shark wrangler.
For more, keep up with Andy at andybudd.com or on Twitter as @andybudd.
Presentations
Leadership By Design 2018
The Accidental Design Leader
Andy first came to prominence in our industry as a designer and web standards enthusiast. He was driven by a desire to improve and professionalise the industry, which is how he came to start the UKs first user experience consultancy, Clearleft. He never set out to be a design leader, but now find himself leading a team of thirty people, almost by accident.
In a quest to understand what makes a great leader, and help his friends in newly minted leadership positions, Andy started the Leading Design conference and Slack community. Over the past 18 months, Andy has interviewed dozens of prominent leaders and listened in on hundreds of Slack conversations about the art and craft of leadership.
In this session, Andy recounts his journey into leadership, shares his successes and failures, and the important lessons he’s learned on the way. The result is a talk packed full of design leadership heuristics suitable for leaders of all shapes, sizes, levels and seniorities.
