Announcing elegant.ly
Since I left Mint, and even quite a bit before that, I’ve been asked dozens of times by startup founders to help with their design, or to provide them with designers to help take them to the next level. My answer for years was one guy, Michael Capone, my former creative director at Novaurora. When Justin Maxwell joined Mint, I then knew two genius designers who understood the full gamut from product design to user experience to visual execution, who could do a lot of heavy lifting in a company who can’t staff an entire team. Knowing two brilliant people, both happily employed, who I trust and worked side-by-side with, doesn’t scale. This is my problem. I need to know more of you, I’m truly sitting on so many amazing opportunities, some will be bigger than Mint.
Similarly, at various points in product development, startups need highly trained strategists and specialists to solve tough problems. People like Indi Young, an expert on experience strategy, or Jared Spool, the authority on user research, serve critical functions for overburdened designers who can’t devote the hours necessary to execute those types of projects. I need more of you too!
elegant.ly I hope is part of the solution. Startups in Silicon Valley, New York, and beyond have grown to respect design and user experience as a defensible business strategy, and designers as more than people who make things pretty, or skin what the engineers build. Dave McClure has told them so, the success of Mint.com has told them so, and I’m sure Apple’s market cap is helping out too. Only those companies will be allowed to submit opportunities to a vetted corps of designers.
It’s an exciting time to be a member of the creative class, more will be announced about this project, in the mean time I hope you’ll join me.
Great stuff here. Forrst has a bunch of great designers worthy of inclusion.
