Principles

Life is too short to spend on websites that waste time. Our favorite sites are the ones where content, visuals and behavior work together to create a great experience, which for us often means taking no more time than necessary to reach a goal. Our passion for using technology to learn and do amazing things, combined with our impatience with sites that distract and obscure, drives us to design sites and applications that provide meaningful information in a way that makes sense to people and helps get things done.

Here are a few principles that guide our work and inspire us.

Everything changes

Change is one of the few the constants in this world. What’s new today is old tomorrow. We design for change. We create flexible interfaces and scaleable frameworks that bend and expand – and that internal web teams can maintain themselves. We see this as an opportunity and not a constraint.

Simple is successful

Many sites suffer from convoluted content, overcomplicated processes, meaningless terminology, and a mind-numbing array of options and functions. Talking with the people who use our clients’ sites and applications has taught us to value clarity, brevity, order and performance. Our designs strike a balance between conveying personality and enhancing usability to deliver effective and enjoyable online interactions.

Know your audience

We believe that you need to know what people think and how systems work before you can create successful designs. In the end, design must indicate, orchestrate and direct the process. Before you can let users know what is possible, how to accomplish it, and reward them for a job well-done, you have to know what they value.

Have a goal

Sounds obvious, but if you don't have a goal, you can't get where you're going. We love to design and are happy to create iteration after iteration that show the possbilities, but we'd rather help define or uncover what is needed to make a site or application successful, and design to help achieve it.