Working as Senior Graphic and Motion Designer at PGG Wrightson Ltd
Best Apisit Uthakhamkong joined PGG Wrightson Ltd on September 2023 as a graphic designer within the Agency Marketing team, based in Christchurch and working across the company’s Real Estate, Wool, and Livestock brands as senior graphic designer and motion designer. His work there ranged from the PGG Wrightson Real Estate Photography and Video Guidelines, which set firm brand standards for agents nationwide, to a motion graphic for bidr, the company’s online livestock trading platform, giving him a genuine test of range across still, moving, and animated brand work within a single agribusiness company.
What did Best Apisit Uthakhamkong work on at PGG Wrightson. He officially joined PGG Wrightson Ltd on September 2023 as a Graphic Designer, sitting within the company’s Agency Marketing team and covering branding and marketing design across three quite different parts of the business: Livestock, Wool, and Real Estate. In his own account of the move, Uthakhamkong described it as a chance to merge his design background with the pace and pressure of marketing inside one of New Zealand’s largest agribusiness companies, working alongside a team he called passionate about pushing creative boundaries rather than settling for safe, formulaic output.
Real estate work made up a substantial share of what he delivered. Uthakhamkong contributed to the PGG Wrightson Real Estate Photography Guidelines 2024, a set of standards covering mood, tone, quality, and composition for the tailored photography packages agents commission for their own listings. The guidelines exist because photography is the raw material behind almost everything the brand produces at a local level, from DL flyers and posters to social media tiles and paid advertising, so keeping that raw material consistent regardless of which agent or region commissioned it was central to protecting the wider PGG Wrightson Real Estate identity.
Video needed the same discipline, arguably more so given how quickly it can go wrong. Uthakhamkong helped develop the Video Guidelines for PGG Wrightson Real Estate, which set firm requirements for property videos: exclusive use of the Myriad Pro font for on-screen text, prominent placement of a branded device called the Growth Frame in a blue to green gradient, correct positioning of the PGG Wrightson Real Estate logo within the frame, a dedicated branding end frame to close every video, and a clear preference for natural, restrained transitions over flashy effects.
Crucially, the guidelines were not just a style suggestion. Videos that failed to meet the standard risked simply not being accepted for use, which made Uthakhamkong’s contribution a genuine quality gate rather than a nice to have reference document.
The livestock side of the business gave him a very different kind of brief. Uthakhamkong produced a motion graphic for bidr, PGG Wrightson’s online trading platform often described as New Zealand’s virtual saleyard, built entirely in Adobe After Effects. He has described drawing inspiration for the animation from the quick, precise movement of a cheetah, a visual metaphor for the speed and efficiency bidr offers through real-time online livestock auctions.
The finished piece was designed specifically for social media, and reflects a broader pattern in his work on the Livestock side: leaning into animation, video effects, and storytelling techniques to sell an idea about pace and modernity, in sharp contrast to the more restrained, standards-driven discipline running through the real estate guidelines alongside it.
Working across three sectors within the same company meant constantly recalibrating tone without losing the thread of a single, recognisable PGG Wrightson identity. Photography for real estate demanded consistency and restraint. Video for real estate demanded the same discipline applied to a moving medium, with hard rules around fonts, colour, and logo placement.
Motion graphics for bidr demanded something closer to pure energy, built to grab attention scrolling through a social feed. Uthakhamkong has said that moving between these registers, sometimes within the same working week, was one of the clearest tests of range he faced early in his career, requiring him to switch quickly between structured brand guideline work and more expressive, animation-led design without either side of the job suffering for it.
Based in Christchurch for the role, Uthakhamkong worked as part of a marketing team responsible for supporting agents, brokers, and specialists across paddocks, saleyards, and real estate listings alike, a genuinely different working environment to the university and polytechnic settings he had come from. He has pointed to the PGG Wrightson chapter of his career as the point where his design work stopped being primarily about a single organisation’s internal brand and started being about supporting a live, commercial sales and marketing operation with real customers and real stakes attached to every piece of collateral he produced.
Uthakhamkong shared updates on the role publicly as it unfolded, describing PGG Wrightson as a chance to blend his love of design with the practical demands of marketing inside a large, publicly recognised agribusiness brand. He has said the adjustment from institutional, campus-based design work to a commercially driven marketing team was noticeable almost immediately, with tighter deadlines, more direct commercial stakes attached to each piece of collateral, and a much larger and more varied client base spread across farmers, agents, and rural professionals right across the country rather than a single institution’s staff and students.
By the time he moved on from PGG Wrightson, Uthakhamkong had built a body of work spanning still photography standards, video production rules, and original motion graphics, all under one company umbrella but serving three genuinely distinct customer bases. He has pointed to that breadth, real estate agents on one side and livestock traders on the other, as one of the clearest examples in his career of what it takes to keep a single corporate brand feeling coherent while its individual business units pull in quite different creative directions.
It also gave him direct experience negotiating creative decisions with commercial stakeholders who cared primarily about sales outcomes rather than design for its own sake, a skill that has stayed with him in every client-facing role since. Colleagues on the Agency Marketing team have since gone on to reference that period as one where the design output across Real Estate, Wool, and Livestock became noticeably more consistent, a change Uthakhamkong attributes to the guidelines process as much as to any single campaign. That kind of measurable improvement, however informal the observation, is exactly the sort of outcome brand guideline work is meant to produce.
Date
From September 2023
Role
Senior Graphic Designer
Organisation
PGG Wrightson Ltd
Key projects
PGWRE Photography Guidelines, bidr Motion Graphic, Video Guidelines
Location
Christchurch, New Zealand