Three years ago, we had the seed of an idea sown from the soil of unanswered opportunity and wanting a better way to nurture creativity. A renewal of what it meant to be a team, a family, and friends.
This site is our way of sharing our journey thus far, our ethos, and some of the work we can show. There is a little bit of everything, a broad smattering of interests and passions united by craft and quality. We’ve got a collection of work that hasn’t shipped yet or is sensitive for all the right reasons, so we don’t take a deep dive into any specifics.
Here’s what you can expect to find, we hope that you enjoy what we’ve put together so far.
We’ve had the luxury as a team of not just working with each other for more than a decade, but also working for many different companies, teams, and consultancies. This has helped us find success through broad processes, approaches and working with other teams.
We speak about this in a few different categories called out as Talking Shop.
We love what we do and it takes time to investigate ideas outside of client expectations.
Random Thoughts is essentially our lab where we can investigate and play, a place to suspend reality and excite the imagination.
This helps not only to inform us but also gives a chance to share ideas about a future or just create something from a place of joy.
We’ve been quite busy the past few years. Many of our collaborations have focused on design systems and future product experiences, which can take many years to realize and require discretion until they do.
As we are able to share in their success, we’ll post more stories here as Case Studies.
We’re designers. We think like designers. Sure, we do design thinking, all while pulling from many approaches and processes.
We focus our combined efforts on creating meaningful and successful solutions in close collaboration with our clients.
We listen, immerse, and create provocations from the mild to the uncomfortable, all with an eye on the direct competition and adjacent influences. This allows the collective thinking to move forward with an informed, diverse perspective.
We dive into the craft and create tightly knit systems with consistent and elegant rules so that teams can evangelize and evolve the designs even further after we are gone.
The goal was to craft a new design system that would make complexity more approachable and empower a design organization to manage legacy and scale.
It was a challenge of modernizing the experience and visuals to relate with a new audience and simultaneously not abandon a core. We began by imagining a high-level direction to demonstrate a range of improvements and potential.
We added depth that was deeply rooted in the complex requirements of the product, driven by a set of foundational principles that would define the experience for Smartsheet going forward.
We needed to understand the aspirations of the leadership team, the complex interaction challenges of the design teams, and the changing competitive –and analogous– landscape.
We further evolved the hero concepts, turning them into a more realistic version of the potential experience.
This became the working vehicle to broadly explore color, typography, imagery, and texture to distill down to a few directions to benchmark and validate.
As the building blocks and rules of the system began to solidify, the refinements coalesced into a system of foundational aesthetic rules, design tokens, micro-interactions, and accessibility considerations.
Next, we needed to document the origin of the system, from foundational rules to in-depth examples. This included the methodology to put the system into practice, and guidelines for extending the system.
Something unexpected can occur when the analog and digital worlds unite. In our study of the flexibility of controls across environmental situations, we created provocations around the ubiquitous dial, slider, and tactile qualities of a cube.
They can bring us more degrees of investigation, granular control along a fixed spectrum and unexpected opportunities to fidget and play.
Whether it’s for a client or our own curiosity, controls continue to be an area of inspiration and a joy to explore.
Our focus is on creating provocative visions, elegant systems, and highly crafted experiences. We have an insatiable curiosity to explore and create from consumer to enterprise, education to healthcare, and emerging technologies of all kinds.
We accomplish this through our mastery of Visual, Motion, and Product design. The rich perspective provided by this combination of skills allows us to craft a complete experience. And with a background in shipping, we approach each project with the mindset to make it real and put it out there in the world.
Design thrives when there is time invested in the freedom of making and crafting for the pure joy of it.
Unfortunately, not every project allows for the space to explore ideas, styles and give unorthodox visions a place to form.
Creative Behavior is our chance to be irreverent, curious, fun, and indulge our imaginations without restraint.
There is the added benefit that we learn new tools and try out different technologies, ultimately adding to our capabilities to realize our visions of the human-computer experience.
We work closely to better understand your ethos, your customers, and your vision. We collaborate, share, and iterate throughout the process to ensure the work aligns with these goals, answers every question, and provokes new questions and ideas.
Our goal is to inspire, teach, and empower others within your organization. We evangelize the solutions and design intents so that the solutions become shared solutions. Our efforts go beyond the work, building a shared design ideology that lives on and allows the ideas to inspire and flourish after we are gone.
Our structure is designed to allow us to partner more deeply with you. We work with one client at a time, with our full effort. We are each 20-year design veterans with a focus on craft and building design maturity within organizations. When we partner we become family, with our sole focus on the health of the work and the relationship.
We help envision the future beyond the next shipping cycle, scouting ahead to define, refine and make tangible what is possible. We accelerate the discovery of new experiences, defining the opportunities for future interactions. All while keeping an eye on making it real.
Your experience is your brand, and tomorrow’s experiences are elevating brands to new levels. We create design systems that scale across products, platforms, and dimensions. We define the signature experiences that embody the brand ethos in every interaction and design the system that allows these solutions to grow and endure over time.
A hybrid boutique, we work as a full service design partner to get new digital products to market, from concept through delivery. Whether working in parallel to or augmenting your internal design team, we know how to partner with product, design, and engineering to ship products across multiple mediums.
