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Meet our 2025 speakers

Here's the first few of our bold, inspiring leaders.
We'll announce more speakers soon!
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Anjana Menon

SPOTIFY

Anjana is a content designer based in London, where she's part of the growth team at Spotify. With a passion for bringing language and design together, Anjana crafts compelling narratives and design strategies that resonate with people.

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Outside work, her creative juices flow when she's diving headfirst into fiction, travelling, making pottery, and learning new languages—right now, it’s Portuguese.

Jane Ruffino

CHARACTER

Jane Ruffino is a UX content strategist, facilitator, and trainer, and she believes the real work of a designer is in building strong relationships. She works with clients all over the world to use language to shape products and services from the ground up. She’s been teaching and designing learning experiences for almost 25 years, from running kids’ programs in archaeology to teaching multinational companies how to connect content with user needs. 

 

Forever an archaeologist at heart, she also cares deeply about how humans use things to mediate relationships, so she’s completing a PhD in the archaeology of the subsea fiber optic cable network. She lives in Stockholm, Sweden, with her partner, their daughter, and a senior rescue dog who would do (almost) anything for cheese. In her spare time, she organises meetups and trawls the local flea markets. 

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Erin Williams

McDONALD'S

Erin Williams leads global experience design at McDonald’s, where her team creates innovative, inclusive experiences that bring feel-good moments to billions worldwide.

 

Prior to McDonald’s, Erin designed a successful career with content at its core. She pioneered content strategy in the early days of interaction design, created breakthrough experiences for Fortune 100 companies, and more recently, built the content design practice at Walmart. 

 

Her driving force is to create positivity in the world,  keeping people and their needs at the heart of everything she does.

 

Offline, Erin loves to dabble in screenwriting, play fetch with her beloved rescue dog Bodie, and travel the world with her loved ones.

Lauren Pope

LA POPE

Lauren Pope is an independent content strategist and content designer. She helps charities, cultural organisations, and nonprofits create content that works towards a better, fairer, more beautiful world. She’s worked in content and digital since 2007 and has delivered projects for some of the world’s biggest brands, including adidas, American Express and Microsoft.

 

She started her own consultancy—La Pope—in 2018 to focus on helping organisations that put people and planet before profit realise the potential of content strategy and design.

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Tina Johnson-Marcel

JP MORGAN CHASE 

With roots firmly tied to her early career as a newspaper journalist, Tina was most recently director, UX, App Ads at Google.

 

At Capital One, she was VP of design and led 75 designers (content, UX, and research) to deliver connected, end-to-end journeys that enable people to access credit, make payments, teach their teens about money, apply for a card in-store, move money seamlessly between accounts, access help when experiencing hardship, and much more.  

Tina also led the conception and execution of the creative, content, and experience strategy for Capital One’s 2021 Black History Month immersive experience. The project, titled Forward, led to unprecedented design installations within five flagship Capital One Cafes in New York City, Chicago, Washington DC, and New Orleans. The effort is a successful demonstration of how an endeavour led by an experience design team can be adopted as an enduring initiative for Capital One's CSR and retail initiatives. 

 

An unapologetic theater geek, Tina was nominated for a 2023 Tony Award as Co-Producer of the play, Fat Ham.

Andy Welfle

CO-AUTHOR, WRITING IS DESIGNING

Andy Welfle is a writer and content designer, living and working in San Francisco, California.

 

He’s the co-author of Writing is Designing: Words and the User Experience, a book about UX writing fundamentals, and has built content design practices at large companies, as well as small, innovative startups.

 

When he’s not in his day job, Andy is probably making zines about bad AI poetry, or podcasts about wooden pencils.

 

Find out more about him and get in touch at andy.wtf.

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Denise Brooks

KONEKTED CONTENT

Denise Brooks is a content strategist with over 15 years experience in supporting businesses with effective digital communications. She specialises in areas such as content design, content governance and DAM strategy.

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She works as an independent consultant for a variety of businesses from Saas start-ups to enterprise level organisations. Her focus is helping organisations to prioritise creating human-centred content and improving the experience of those that engage with it.

The organisations she loves to serve produce valuable content for people, not Google. They are purpose-led, committed to making a difference to individuals, teams or communities.

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When she’s not facilitating workshops, she’s trying to become the Venus Wiliams of the pickleball world (emphasis on trying).

Elizabeth McGuane

SHOPIFY

Elizabeth is a design director and author. She's been working in content design since 2007, and currently leads a large multidisciplinary design team at Shopify.

 

In 2023, she wrote a book called Design by Definition about the role of language, naming and metaphor in design. She works remotely from an old yellow house on the eastern edge of Canada, which is just as nice as it sounds. 

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Sally Bagshaw

CANVA

With a background in business communication, a flair for working with complex stakeholders, and the passion to create better experiences for users, Sally has been committed to improving digital products with content since 2001.

 

She has worked extensively across a wide variety of industries including some of the big names in government, retail, superannuation, higher education, banking and publishing.

 

Now, as the head of content design at Canva, she's on a mission to bring clarity and joy to over 190M people who use Canva every month. Sally is based in sunny Brisbane, Australia and, if you listen carefully, you can hear her pug Henri snoring at her feet.

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