When we first started kicking around ideas this past Spring, we weren’t completely sure what this partnership was going to yield. Matthew has loads of experience with real-world usability testing and interface design, corporate politics, and communicating with people who don’t know what you’re talking about. Paul has a Masters degree in Management Information Systems so he does “all that stuff” extremely well, he is a true technologist with multiple languages under his belt, and also is enamored with online communication and information architecture. I like to make things work better – and those things may include user interfaces, backend code for a content management system, or an unruly IA that doesn’t handle the site well anymore. So those are a quick overview of our best skills, but what now?
It seems as though lots of people in the weblog/design community are stepping away from “a real job” and are now freelancing full-time or have started their own design agency specializing in standards-compliant, usable design. Here are a few notables:
- Doug Bowman and Stopdesign
- Dave Shea and Bright Creative
- Dan Rubin and webgraph (Summer ’04 is almost up Danny!)
- Jeffrey Zeldman and Happy Cog
- Andrei H. and TBA
And oh believe me there are many more, that was just a small handful. So Matthew, Paul, and myself definitely have the capabilities of starting YA design + usability firm, but we chose to do something a little different. We realized that we simply want to help businesses succeed, and a business is nothing without it’s customers. If you can’t have a great relationship with the people who give you their hard-earned money, then they’ll go spend that hard-earned money somewhere else. Design is a communicative process, but we wanted to be more intimately involved in this communication so we thought that Business Logs was the perfect blend of everything we wanted to do.
