Emma Butler

Emma Butler is Full Stacks’s Design Director and the person who somehow takes our team’s indecipherable post-it doodles and turns them into exactly the thing we were trying to describe. She’s been shaping the agency’s design vision for more than a decade, bringing together sharp design instincts, patience for the rest of the team’s weird requests, and a love of typography (get ready to have your kerning critiqued!).

Originally from the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand, Emma swapped Kiwi life for the Canadian Rockies right after high school, working as a camp counsellor and earth science educator before deciding to really embrace her visually creative side. A couple of design diplomas later, she jumped into the marketing agency world and hasn’t looked back.

With nearly two decades of experience spanning branding, web design, and graphic design, Emma’s happy place is solving messy design challenges: untangling the vague, overcomplicated, or just plain contradictory input she gets and turning it into visuals that are clear, effective, and actually useful. At Full Stacks, she’s the steady hand behind visual identities, user-friendly websites, and all the small but mighty crucial details that make design decisions really work (and help our clients make more money).

Outside of work, Emma’s life revolves around bikes, travel, and being outside as much as possible. She loves planning trips (especially the kind that involve bringing her bike bag) and often goes back to New Zealand with her Canadian wife (who somehow convinced her -40 ℃ is an acceptable temperature to live in during winter). Emma is a PMBIA-certified mountain biking instructor and as part of her mission to “spread the gospel of bikes”, she spends the bike season coaching eager riders with SheShreds. She golfs enthusiastically but terribly, and has never met a water hazard she didn’t believe she could clear. Emma cooks exactly one thing (also enthusiastically): tacos.

Emma loves to camp, hike, and manages to talk her bear-averse wife into always joining her. When she’s not on two wheels, you’ll find her wrangling her dogs, Penny and Pippin, or watching football on TV (both the American and ‘beautiful game’ versions). She also plays the guitar and mandolin, though she probably spends more time making sure their humidifiers are topped up than actually playing them. (It’s just so dry in Edmonton!)