About
Ko Āwherika ki te Tonga te whakapaparanga mai.
I whānau mai au i Pretoria, i tipu ake au i Johannesburg me Edenvale.
I te tau 1997 i haere mai tōku whānau ki Aotearoa.
Ko Tūwakamana, ko Cockle Bay, tōku kāinga tuatahi.
Ka mihi au ki a Ngāi Tai ki Tāmaki, ngā mana whenua o taua wāhi.
Ko Phil Botha tōku ingoa.
Getting alongside your team, understanding the kaupapa, and building something that works everywhere it lands.
I am a designer and creative director working with organisations that want their brand, website and content pulling in the same direction. Most of them are small teams, some with huge dreams. I jump in and help them get there.
For seven and a half years I ran design in-house at Hynds, across a group of manufacturing companies. I learned how a brand holds together at scale, and how quickly it comes apart when nobody is watching the joins. Then in 2015 I went to Tearfund. Smaller budgets, much bigger reasons. I found I cared a lot more about the second part, and most of the work since has followed that. An anti-trafficking network repositioning at the United Nations. A retelling of the Parihaka invasion. A packaging company pitching at Ocean Impact Pitchfest.
If you run a small organisation you already know the problem is rarely ideas. It is capacity. So I plan the work to be reused. One shoot at Eden Park gave Asthma New Zealand a year of campaign content across every audience and format they had, and the Asthma Awareness Week system it produced gets run again each year by their own team.
I built my first working website when I was about sixteen. It got more than thirty thousand views and ended up in a newspaper, but that was not the part that hooked me. What hooked me was helping people tell their stories, seeing something that had only existed in my head turn up in the real world, and seeing it make a positive change. Posters, signwriting, flyers, the school magazine, business cards for whoever asked: I have been doing versions of this ever since, through a four-year degree at the University of Auckland, a first job designing a weekly newspaper on my own, roughly twenty-five years in this industry, and now this little home studio.
My values are common ground with every client I work with. I am a Christian, and that is the plainest way I can explain them.