Andy Budd

Andy is an internationally renowned Design Leader, Speaker, Advisor and Coach. A designer at heart, Andy loves using his knowledge of business, technology and human behaviour to help ambitious leaders build, scale and professionalise their business. As such, Andy is in his element working alongside company founders, board members and their leadership teams.

Andy is currently applying his design leadership skills in two areas. First he's working as a Venture Partner at Seedcamp—Europes most successful early stage Venture Fund—helping to bake an appreciation of design into start-ups from the outset. At the same time he's supporting over a dozen Heads, Directors and VPs of Product and Design as an executive coach and mentor.

Andy first came to prominence as an early pioneer of Web Standards, thanks to his hugely popular blog (one of the highest trafficked in the UK at the time), and best selling book, CSS Mastery. Andy then helped popularise the field of UX design, setting up the UKs first dedicated UX agency, along with its first and arguably best UX conference.

Andy led Clearleft as Managing Director for 13 years, where he was responsible for setting company vision and strategy, promoting the value of design around the world, and helping leaders at companies like Channel 4, Virgin Holidays and Penguin Books realise their digital potential. Andy was very active in the day-to-day running of the company, setting company strategy, looking after the leadership team and ensuring the happiness and wellbeing of his 30+ staff. He was also responsible for founding two product businesses while he was there, FontDeck and Silverback.

Andy has always had a passion for sharing his knowledge, and can regularly be found speaking at international conferences like SXSW, Awwwards and The Next Web. This led Andy to founding dConstruct (the first digital design conference in the UK), UX London (the longest running UX conference in Europe) and Leading Design (a global community of nearly 2,000 design leaders). Andy also 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, why he was asked to join the Adobe Design Circle, and has appeared on the BIMA100, WIreHive100 and Wired Mag 100 list of the most influential people in tech.

Never happier than when he's diving some remote tropical atoll, Andy is a qualified PADI dive instructor, cave diver and retired shark wrangler.