Beck Laxton

Beck Laxton worked as a magazine journalist, an information designer and as a user experience architect for a London digital agency before moving into the charity sector. She has worked for huge organisations and tiny ones, on both printed documents and online ones, on big functional websites and tiny low-budget ones – always aiming to make them accessible, useful and clear, with a focus on user needs. Highlights of her career have included spending eight hours in a room full of lawyers arguing about current-account mortgage terms; designing a website for new flavours of Magnum based on the seven deadly sins; rewriting the Royal Mail redirection form that she had used when she was a postman; and interviewing Chas and Dave. 

In her spare time she sings as much as possible, mostly music from the sixteenth century, and does historical re-enactments – as a medieval minstrel, a Tudor baker and cobbler, and an Edwardian music-hall drag act. A lifelong feminist, she is also an advocate of gender-neutral parenting and was once described by the Daily Mail as “a few sequins short of a tutu”.