Hug Your Designer Day, part 2

Robby Russell — Wed, 23 May 2007 17:04:00 -0500

In an effort to increase awareness of the importance of good Interaction and Interface Design in Web Development… I suggested that today be... Hug Your Designer Day.

Designers Versus Developers

Are you seeing a lot of this in your Design and Development teams?

Allison Beckwith, Experience Director and Graeme Nelson, Lead Architect

Happy Designers and Happy Developers

Well, maybe it’s time that your developers gave your designers a hug…

Alain Bloch, Web Developer and Chris Griffin, User Interface Designer

Also… to celebrate Hug Your Designer Day, Amy Hoy was kind enough to post her slides and some audio that I recorded of her talk at RailsConf 07.

Let’s all take a moment to thank the designers who put the experience of the users first. The success of our projects rely on everyone working together. Hug Your Designer! (they might hug back…)

Meet... Chris, Graeme., and Gary

Robby Russell — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 11:01:00 -0600

Okay, this is a little overdue… but better late than never! ;-)

We’ve had several new people start with PLANET ARGON over the past few months. Some of them are blogging about their experience of working with Ruby on Rails and being a part of our team. I wanted to quickly introduce you to a few of them and their blogs, which I hope that you consider subscribing to.

Chris

For quite some time, we’ve been needing more design assistance, so late last year… we hired Chris Griffin, who moved here last year from Florida. He’s our new User Interface Designer and gets to work within the Rails environment everyday with the rest of us. It seems that Brian and Chris worked over the weekend to get his new blog up. Chris is self-proclaimed genius. I suggest that you keep an eye on his blog… because I’m sure it’s going to be a pretty active one. Chris joining our team marks a pivotal point in our teams evolution as we continue to place more emphasis in our Design and Development process on the User Experience.

http://chriszgriffin.com/

Graeme

Our newest hire is Graeme Nelson, who recently moved to Portland from Seattle. He just joined our Design and Development team and if you’ve been reading the Rails-related blogs, you might have seen his blog already. He’s been blogging a lot about using RSpec with Rails and other fun things. He’s been contracting with us since the start of the year and I’m really excited that he’s accepted a job offer and joined the team!

http://blog.imperialdune.com/

Gary

Last… but not least is Gary Blessington. I believe that I first offered Gary a job with PLANET ARGON about 2 1/2 years ago when we were still focused on PHP/PostgreSQL…. but PHP apparently wasn’t enough of a catalyst. Gary and I previously worked together at Imark Communications several years ago, when I first started doing web development. He was the senior developer on the team and was an important mentor during my early days of developing in a professional environment. Late last year, he hung up his .NET tool belt to become our Design and Development Director. He started blogging earlier this year and is sharing his experience of switching from .NET to Ruby on Rails.

http://garyblessington.us/.

I’ll introduce the others as they start blogging and such. :-)