Every discipline, hands on.

I founded Indigo because the gap was obvious: video demand was accelerating, the technology was making high-quality content more accessible, and brands needed a partner who could think strategically as well as point a camera. A decade on, it’s an award-winning video, animation and photography agency with its own studio thirty minutes outside London, working for Virgin Atlantic, Hilton, Octopus Energy, Unilever, the BBC, the NHS and various corners of government.

As Co-founder and Creative Director I do everything a Creative Director does, and quite a lot a Creative Director shouldn’t have to. I set creative and strategic direction across every key account from pitch to delivery, own the P&L, lead business development and senior client relationships, and still direct and review edits.

• Directed Hilton’s ‘Uncorking Potential’ campaign across the UK and EMEA, part of a ten-year, 50+ film relationship.
• Award-winning recruitment films for Virgin Atlantic (‘Diverse Cabin Crew’) and Octopus Energy (‘Women in Engineering’), winning at the FIRM, ISE and Recruiter Awards.
• Created the hero film and photography for Visit Kent’s biggest-ever coastal campaign, live across 109 London Underground sites with a projected reach of over 20 million.
• Produced cruise marketing for Saga that helped drive a 13% rise in River Cruise revenue and doubled Ocean Cruise profit year on year.
• Delivered Kent County Council public health campaigns reaching 235,000+ views in 30 days and nearly a million in a month, click-throughs up 160%.
• Produced the NHS national graduate campaign and campaigns for DEFRA and the Office for Product Safety & Standards.

We also run studio placements with local creative colleges, mentoring media students through real production. Not the flashiest thing we do. Maybe the most worthwhile.

As Design and Brand Manager, I led the brand and visual communications function for the Audit Commission, the central government body responsible for financial accountability across the UK public sector. It was a brand with a serious job to do: communicate transparency and accountability clearly to audiences that ran from finance directors to the general public, and look credible doing it. I joined as a Senior Designer in 2002 and was promoted to lead the function as Design and Brand Manager in 2005.

Heading a team of senior and junior designers, I owned creative output across print, digital, PR and broadcast. I led a full rebrand of the organisation, built its brand governance from the ground up, and modernised the creative processes behind it, which sharpened the consistency, clarity and turnaround of the Commission’s communications across every channel.

Freeway Media was a magazine publisher based in Shoreditch before it was fashionable, which tells you roughly how long ago this was. As Production and Design Manager at an independent publisher, I did more or less everything.

I ran a portfolio of lifestyle and hospitality titles, leading the design and copywriting team, shaping the creative direction of each magazine, art-directing the photography, and getting every issue to press on time. Then the web arrived. Freeway wanted a site for every publication, so I designed and built them for the whole portfolio, which at the time meant teaching yourself HTML on the job and hoping nobody looked too closely at the code.

• Led a team of designers and copywriters across a portfolio of lifestyle and hospitality titles.
• Shaped the creative and editorial direction of each magazine, cover to back page.
• Art-directed photography, from commissioning the shoot to the final selection.
• Designed and built websites for every title, in the early days when nobody knew the rules.
• Owned production end to end, delivering each issue to press on schedule.

It was the role that taught me how to do a lot with very little, how to move fast without dropping the quality, and how to work across print and digital before most people had decided those were different disciplines. All of which turned out to be quite useful later.

Guardian News and Media, which is a fairly serious place to learn your trade. As Assistant Production Manager and Senior Designer, I worked on the design and production of weekly newspaper publications: laying out pages, assisting with art direction, and keeping the whole thing moving toward a deadline that did not negotiate.

• Designed and laid out pages for weekly newspaper titles.
• Assisted with art direction across the publications.
• Ran the production side end to end, getting each issue out on time, every time.
• Worked to the kind of weekly print deadlines that teach you to be fast and right at the same time.

Newspapers are an unforgiving way to learn production. The deadline arrives whether you are ready or not, which turns out to be excellent training for everything that came after.

Custima International was my first job out of university, and as it turned out, my first proper foray into digital. The role sat right on the line between traditional print design and the emerging digital world, which in 1996 was a genuinely exciting place to be standing.

• Designed across both print and early digital, back when those were rarely the same job.
• Built websites and user interfaces in tools like Dreamweaver and FreeHand.
• Learned the craft of design from the ground up, on real work for real clients.

It was the start of a career-long habit of working across print and digital at once, and a front-row seat for the web arriving. I have been chasing that mix of craft and new technology ever since.