We are not a creative agency. In fact, we’re more of an anti-agency. Rather than taking on additional services, we want you to be successful.
We're a small, exclusive, secret, multidisciplinary design collective. We're all "classically educated" and "real world" tempered. We embrace user centered design in all its modern guises. This is our day job. We're design snobs, but without egos. We can teach you how to read hex colors and what that font is. And we thrive on helping our clients solve problems.
We support agencies, start-ups, and companies with research, strategy, design, product management, and digital education empowering them to create engaging user experiences.
We are teachers. Just as much as we work on software, we teach clients, practitioners and organizations about software. We help designers learn new approaches and skill sets, and we teach clients how to “speak” designer and developer. We love learning and then helping everyone be better at what they do. In the end, the users win.
Team
Michael Salamon
A multi-talented designer, digital strategist, keynote speaker, and recognized thought-leader in user experience and design.
Michael Salamon is a design leader, design manager, and a practicing production designer. With over 30 years of professional design experience, Michael’s work spans print design, desktop applications, websites, apps (both web and mobile), motion design, illustration, sculpture, photography, and animation. His clients have ranged from members of the Fortune 100 to modest two-person start-ups. If it can be designed, Michael probably has a version of it in his archives.
Michael is a top-rated speaker at conferences and corporate events worldwide and on occasion, is asked to author an article or give a presentation. He’s been known to lecture at the College of Arts and Media at the University of Colorado Denver, various boot camps around the country, and what feels like a million different conferences. But deep down he’s just a hard-core design junkie, music nerd, and coffee addict.
Emily Mertens
A trusted strategist, designer, leader and business partner in user experience efforts.
Emily’s 15 years in the digital product space have made her an expert in nearly every part of the process, from user research and strategy, to design planning, to detailed UX designs and working with developers to bring them to life. Extensive background in project management and operations have also given her the critical skill of balancing user and business success. She loves solving hard problems and turning complex tasks into easy processes.
Emily is known for becoming a true partner to her clients. Her work spans desktop applications, websites, web and mobile apps, and strategic business planning artifacts for the likes of Boeing, Fidelity, Intuit, Aetna, Wells Fargo, Cabela’s and National Geographic, among other small startups (her favorites). When not solving problems on a screen, she’s busy running trails, running real estate projects, and chasing her two sons near their Colorado mountain home.
Approach
Only what’s useful.
We take a transparent and direct approach to working with clients; we believe that understanding and tackling their problems is more important than time spent in meetings. We focus solely on deliverables that drive the most value and can be immediately put to use (because nobody needs a journey map that only serves as wall art). We maximize budgets by maximizing the efficiency of the design tools available today, cutting out extra steps between great ideas and working software. We are skilled and versed in working closely with developers and the software production life cycle.
Focused on users.
We focus first on understanding the users, or the people impacted by a software tool, then on addressing the problem. We’ll often recommend that we start with research to understand the users’ behavior, pain points, and spoken/unspoken needs, then work together with our clients to translate the research findings into an actionable game plan. From there, we can do simple or complex, comprehensive design work to create something that both delights users and supports business goals. We can create highly visual concepts to garner high-level support, or get into the nitty-gritty, page by page design work that is ready for development consumption.
Wrong, often.
We take an approach of curiosity. We’re not afraid to be wrong; in fact we like to be proven wrong because it leads to more refinement and a better end product. We focus heavily on the user feedback loop; conducting usability testing throughout a process to ensure we’re in line with user needs.
Direct, always.
We work closely with our clients, gathering feedback along the way to avoid big reveals and surprises. We pride ourselves in leaving them better off than when we started. Our aim is to equip and teach our clients to use the tools and strategies we give them to go forward and continually make their software products and experiences better.
Finally, we work and communicate directly. Everyone on our team is also versed in software project management and the various admin skills required to keep work moving forward. We are our own assistants.
