I was Head of Design and subsequently Creative Director for Brainnwave for over 7 years.
What I Did:
Creative Leadership and Brand Development: I completely re-vamped our visual identity boosting brand awareness and building the company profile. From the obvious things like websites and logo, to pushing clarity in copywriting and tone of voice, workshopping and developing our brand values and ensuring consistency across all touch-points from platform interfaces right down to email signatures and sign-offs.
Strategic Direction: As part of the leadership and executive team I was able to contribute to decision making and carved out a degree of autonomy with regard to design and creative decisions.
Stakeholder Engagement: I worked with the product, design and development teams regularly, following product design features from concept to completion. I was able to contribute to user interviews, dig into platform and website analytics and bridge any gaps between executive requests, product requirements, development team abilities and user expectations.
Leadership and Mentorship: In addition to a general leadership role with Brainnwave, I also hired and managed an additional designer during a period of expansion. Helping, understanding and working with them to build out product designs and encouraging them to build autonomy in areas they were keen to explore.
Alex is a very supportive manager... I learned a lot from our time working together, always felt I could come to him with questions or for advice and feel very grateful for the trust and faith he put in me in my first official product design role.
I worked with Alex for nearly two years, during which I quickly discovered his professional & understanding nature. Despite his seniority, he never imposed unnecessary pressure on me and instead created an atmosphere of collaboration and growth.
Results from my time at Brainnwave:
Sales boost: Within first year I re-designed the core product UX, helping the company achieve over £1m in customer sales.
Helped secure funding: Rebranding the company with a fresh corporate image helped the company secure £1m in further seed funding.
Data platform designs for Aggreko: I worked with the development team and had design control over the data platform we developed for Aggreko which resulted in a 25% increase in their pipeline and phenomenal 1000%+ ROI.
Further investment: In 2019, I redesigned the core company platform to make it relevant for a new joint venture partner helping to secure a $10m Series A investment.
International team collaboration: Worked closely on developing multiple designs for Hatch design teams and engineers in Canada, the USA and Australia.
Refinement of recruitment process: Seeing low numbers of job applicants I took the initiative to analyse and improve our job descriptions, company culture website pages, interview process and onboarding. This involved everything from analysing gender coded words and understanding what items were missing or could be added to encourage diversity right through to post-interview chats with potential applicants and those who had just started. We went from very few applicants to 100s of diverse applicants for every position and the job pages being the top performing parts of our company website.
Other things I did at Brainnwave:
Became very literally “the voice of Brainnwave” after recording our telephony system answering messages and voicing most of our platform walkthrough videos.
Designed the literally and metaphorically bittersweet cider bottle labels (“Appley Ever After”) for our final team building activity in 2024.
While at Brainnwave I worked on both Brainnwave and Mosaic.