Meet the Team: Andy

For this month’s instalment, we spoke to our Senior Designer, Andy who loves nothing more than designing and creating websites for our customers to enjoy. When he isn’t exploring ways to make our sites more attractive and accessible for our customers, Andy enjoys keeping active, spending time with his son and experimenting with animation. Have you ever heard of ultra-running? Me neither- but it sounds brutal. If you’re as intrigued as I am, you’ll just have to keep reading…

Tell us about your role at FWG?

As Senior Designer at FWG I work on developing and maintaining all our brands and creative campaigns across various products. Using data and research to create new designs from the point of the proposal through to delivery, I modernise our existing brands to make them more appealing for customers. Our products can be complex, so it’s up to me to ensure that our websites and animations communicate what we do in a clear, concise and friendly tone, hopefully mirroring the same experience our customers receive when speaking to an expert adviser.

What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

The most rewarding part of my role is making an impact on our customers’ experiences. This could be launching a brand and seeing new ideas, sketches or concepts coming to life, or working alongside our Conversion Rate Optimization Analyst to create something that is both attractive and supports the data.

What do you find challenging about your job?

Design can be very subjective, and everyone has an opinion on what they like and don’t like. With that in mind, I love the challenge of coming up with multiple designs that we can test to see which is most successful. We have such a short window to engage with our users, therefore, it’s crucial our designs are engaging and user friendly.

What led you to this career?

I’d always loved to draw and paint when I was at school, so when deciding what course to choose at college, Graphic Design felt like a natural route to take. I was able to combine all the things I was passionate about and build the necessary skills to fit into a commercial environment.

What’s your go-to productivity tip?

I’m an early bird and find that I’m much more productive first thing in the morning.  I use a lot of post-it notes to keep track of ongoing projects and organise these into a priority order at the end of each day. That way, I’m ready to dive into work first thing the next morning.

If you could become an expert in something, what would it be and why?

I really enjoy using After Effects to produce animations or video edits but I’m nowhere near an expert. You can do some amazing things with animation, with so many of us living on our smartphones now you can capture the attention of a viewer through storytelling much easier than writing reams of copy.

If you could only have three apps on your smartphone, what would they be?

I think the three apps I use most of the time are Strava, Garmin and Training Peaks. I cycle a lot and love to see the stats and data from various rides.

What’s one hobby you would love to get in to and why?

When I’m not running around after my 5-year-old, I like to train for triathlons but haven’t done one for quite some time. If I got the chance to get back into training, I’d love to take up ultra-running (the hardcore version of a marathon). I’d really like to see if I could tackle a 50-mile race in the next couple of years and maybe take a stab at one of the big events, such as the Marathon des Sables in the Sahara Desert.

If you missed last month’s Meet the Team, don’t worry, you can read all about our Conversion Rate Optimization Analyst, Kevin, here!