Manchester headquartered strategic design agency Absurd has appointed highly experienced service design specialist Mark Webster as Design Director to support its continued growth and expanded team.
Mark, who has previously led teams at LovedBy Design, Common Good and Great Fridays, joins Absurd as the company restructures its senior management team and brings in new staff, taking its head count to 15, with additional, current roles still to be filled.
He will oversee the agency’s design team and operations, helping clients transform their business and user needs into commercially viable and actionable strategies for new product and service delivery. Working alongside Absurd’s two founders Oliver Bailey and Oli Taylor he will also input into the agency’s growth and future strategy.
Mark said: “This is such an exciting time to be joining Absurd – an agency that I’ve tracked from inception to present day and seen go from strength to strength. The calibre of the team and scale of the clients I’ll be working on gives me a great opportunity to expand my own skills and career.
“I look forward to bringing team members back together in the office as well as maintaining a strong remote working culture, and I’ll be looking at new ways to deliver operational design excellence for all of our clients.”
Oli Taylor, co-founder of Absurd, said: “Mark is a strong design leader with a successful track record of delivering products and services that meet user and organisational goals. Mark joins us in a hybrid role as Design Ops Director, helping to shape and formulate operational processes within the agency as the design team continues to grow.
“His experience, having worked with both UK and global brands, is exactly what we needed to enable us to continue to grow. We’ve had a phenomenal year so far, which sees us working with some of the fastest growing organisations in the UK as well as many businesses looking to expand globally. All of our new business has come from ambitious, forward thinking companies looking to scale at pace or accelerate digital services that will better meet the needs of their audiences, be that business customers or consumers.”
The appointments come on the back of Absurd winning a number of major UK-wide and global projects, which include ongoing programmes for Cignpost – Express Test, one of the UK’s largest Covid-19 testing service providers and Australian employee wellbeing platform Prosper Ex. The agency’s long-standing clients include Umbro, Brother, Electrical Safety First and Select Property Group.
