No matter how much you invest in mastering your craft, or how committed you are to staying ahead, the industry will eventually force you out of your comfort zone. I spent most of the first ten years of my career fully immersed in Flash, determined to be among the best in the world. Even as I began transitioning into creative direction, I refused to let my Flash skills fade. I would spend my days leading teams and my nights perfecting builds, driven by the idea that being a great leader meant staying deeply connected to the work itself.
At the time, I couldn’t imagine a world where Flash wouldn’t be relevant. Then one day, Steve Jobs made the decision to effectively end Flash’s role on the web. I spent a few months convincing myself it would somehow bounce back, but it quickly became clear the shift was permanent. That December, instead of taking a break, I spent my entire two-week holiday learning HTML5 and CSS3. I built my first responsive website from scratch. I had never even created an HTML portfolio before, but I understood that staying still wasn’t an option.
Moving early turned out to be one of the best decisions I could have made. While my love for Flash never really disappeared, it was obvious the opportunities were shrinking fast. At the same time, responsive design was gaining momentum, and clients were already expecting websites that worked seamlessly across devices. I decided to leave Ogilvy and start my own agency, which allowed me to apply this new approach to our work from day one. We embraced WordPress as our CMS of choice and focused on building responsive websites that delivered value across desktop, tablet, and mobile.
Over time, running the agency became more challenging. Fully responsive WordPress themes and powerful plugins flooded the market, making it harder to charge a premium for work that increasingly could be done by almost anyone. I returned to agency life, directing campaigns and continuing to support teams. Flash never completely disappeared, and I was fortunate to still be involved in some remarkable projects, but responsive web design had become the norm.
After a couple of years, I was laid off. For a while, I freelanced and kept building websites, but the fallback of being able to rely on that work was already under pressure. When Squarespace launched, I struggled with the idea of taking a client’s money to build something I could set up in an afternoon. It felt disingenuous, and I knew I needed to rethink how I created value.
I leaned further into design leadership and systems thinking, areas I had already started exploring long before they became popular talking points. While working on a design system for Nikon, I saw firsthand how critical this approach would become for any large-scale design operation. Later, when I transitioned into an in-house role, I was responsible for centralising a fragmented design team around a single system, ensuring that multiple squads across the organisation were aligned. This alignment allowed teams to focus on improving the experience rather than spending their time reinventing the interface.
As I moved into early-stage startups, I applied the same principles to help teams align and scale products effectively. Even now, I believe systems thinking remains one of the most important aspects of delivering great design at scale.
I was fortunate to avoid the more speculative side of trends like crypto and NFTs, though I still took the time to understand how blockchain technology worked and explored what it could mean for creative industries. Learning for the sake of staying informed has always been part of how I work, but I have also learned not to chase every shiny new object.
We are now in the middle of the biggest shift since the dot com boom of the 90s. AI, automation and emerging platforms are forcing everyone to rethink how they work and what value looks like. While I have always embraced technology and continued to learn new skills, the heart of my work has been leadership. I have been doing that far longer than I was a full time practitioner of any single discipline.
Over the years, I have spent time learning everything from designing logos and working in print to storytelling, 3D, animation, video editing, motion graphics and countless other skills that would take too long to list comprehensively. For me, these were not isolated capabilities, they were simply part of delivering more complete and considered work. Often, it made sense to bring in specialists who could focus on a particular area while I concentrated on ensuring everything held together strategically and creatively.
It honestly makes me laugh that so many people are not even willing to work across lanes, because I have spent my entire career moving between them. I have always been curious to explore new things and never cared whether the challenge involved creating an AR experience, designing merchandise or staging an event. I am creative, I always have been, and I am comfortable doing just about anything I get the opportunity to do, while still making leadership my primary focus.
Today, I still believe in staying close to the work, but I know where I add the most value. I am first and foremost a creative leader. I have never stopped learning, and I do not plan to. Experience has taught me that no matter how confident you are in your skills, history will repeat itself. Sooner or later, you will be forced to adapt, evolve and find new ways to contribute.
That is the constant in this industry. Nothing stays still.