Andy Budd

As a renowned 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 overseeing our creative output, Andy can be found sharing his wealth of knowledge at international conferences 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 Clearleft 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.