As the Executive Creative Director of SHIFT, Simone lives and breathes brand design. She believes in the power of design thinking to affect meaningful and transformative impact for businesses, brands, and people alike.

With over 18 years’ experience in brand design, Simone is passionate about using design as a vehicle to tell a brand’s story and to inspire brand belief, both internally and externally.

As a creative leader, Simone believes in cultivating an environment that inspires creativity. She is passionate about leading by example, and creating a culture of respect, honestly, humility and integrity. Simone remains actively involved as a designer within SHIFT, to remain in the trenches with my team and keep herself energised as a true creative at heart.

Her role involves driving her team to push beyond their own creative boundaries in the pursuit of highly crafted, excellent design solution that live up to world-class industry standards and trends in order to grow their clients. As such, Simone and her team have been recognised with numerous local and international design awards (*See full list attached.)

She has served as a Loeries Awards judge ((Design) in 2009, 2012, 2015 and 2017, 2019, 2021. A career highlight is serving on the D&AD Awards judging panel (Direct) in 2019. Simone is passionate about growing and nurturing young creative talent by fostering growth and creative excellence.

Pride of Africa remains one of her favourite projects. The organisation wanted to expand its purpose beyond South Africa’s borders and take up the fight for all voiceless LGBTQ+ Africans, thereby becoming the first local Pride march to represent a whole continent. To do so, it needed to rebrand itself from the single-city Johannesburg Pride to the first ever pan-African LGBTQ+ platform: Pride of Africa. The brand logo was turned into the first ever all-African rainbow flag, distilled from each of the 54 African countries flags. The result was an adaptive symbol as diverse as each country’s pride community, and as unified as their fight for free expression. She loves this piece as it used design to as a vehicle to make a positive transformative impact in the lives of Africa's LGBTQ+ community. The project was awarded a Bronze Cannes Lions.