Founded and led by Rosie Lidington, Foothills brings 17 years of design experience to mission-driven organisations building ethical products and services.


We run regular full day workshops, design sprints and free masterclasses for founders and leaders, focusing on one core design topic. Providing guidance for how to validate idea direction, understand your customers, and build the right thing—before investing months building on assumptions.

Our aim is to help founders and leaders achieve 3 key steps to get their ideas off the ground:

1. Visualise your ideas using expert methods

Create early prototypes you can test with real people, before investing months of development time on the wrong thing.

2. Understand your customer needs

Understand who you're actually building for, not who you hope you're building for. Learn how to gather real user insights on your concepts and ideas to avoid guesswork.

3. Build design frameworks to move forward with

Make strategic decisions backed by evidence and get on the right path with mood boards, concepts, journey maps and roadmaps, so you can move forward with clarity.

Free masterclass topics include Understanding Your Customers, Defining Your Brand, Creating User Personas, Empathy Mapping, Mapping User Journeys, Creating a Concept, Prototyping on Figma, Running User Testing sessions

Our workshops include

For Founders:

Design Kick Starter Day Workshop

Full day workshop to define your vision, user needs, and design decisions

Minimum Viable Product 2 week Sprint

Workshop-lead foundation sprint to prototype and visualise your product or service and validate it with your target customer.

For growing organisations

Design Strategy Day Workshop

Shift from reactive design to strategic, research-driven design that creates real impact.

Design Strategy 2 Week Sprint

Workshop-lead foundation sprint to prototype and visualise your product or service and validate it with your target customer.

Come join founders learning how to compress months of guesswork into days of validated learning

About your instructor:

Rosie Lidington has spent 17 years designing products for organisations like The Guardian, BBC, NHS, Findmypast, and Ambassador Theatre Group, understanding complex user needs and creating experiences that genuinely serve people. She now helps mission-driven founders and scale-ups build products through Foothills Design.