The Role—Leading six designers, and still on the tools

RAIN was a digital agency of more than a hundred people, specializing in app design. I led a design team of six. I was in pitches, in bidding and in most client meetings, and I stayed a contributor the whole way through rather than only directing. The work on this page is my own, with help where it is noted.

The range was the fun part. A county library one month, a Fortune 500 the next, with work for Bono and Ozzy Osbourne mixed in.

The Work—The clients, and some of the work

• —Salt Lake City Public Library: website overhaul and identity.
• —Under Armour: See Green Facebook app.
• —Adobe: Analytics Survey app.
• —Google: a Twitter-powered app.
• —ICON Health & Fitness: a treadmill app and two iPhone apps.
• —LifeLock: LifeLock Jr. web banner campaign.
• —St. Joseph County Public Library: website redesign.
• —School Specialty: promo video for a new digital platform.
• —Kin2: branding, demo videos, website, print, smartphone app, posters and banner ads.
• —Mozy: demo videos, 3D and identity work.

Lono was a smart irrigation controller: up to twenty zones, run from a phone, with weather-based scheduling meant to cut water use by somewhere between 20% and 70%. RAIN incubated it and I co-founded it.

The team was one designer and one developer. Between us we named and branded the company, built a working prototype, ran a Kickstarter that raised twice its $75,000 goal, built the site and the iOS app, designed the packaging, ran the social campaign, mailed the product out and answered the support email.

A library website in 2011 was usually a brochure with a link out to whatever system actually held the catalog. Salt Lake City asked for the opposite. Your account lives on the page: your fines, your card, a book checked out without going anywhere else, with the events calendar and the social feeds around it. The site stopped describing the library and started being it. Communication Arts made it a Webpick.

St. Joseph County saw that work and came to us wanting a harder version of it. A library’s collection had stopped being one collection: the physical stock sat in the catalog, the audiobooks and ebooks sat with several separate lending vendors, and none of them behaved alike. We wired them together so a borrower saw one library rather than a directory of systems, with a single search covering the catalog and the site, and the events and book highlights around it.

iFit is the software side of ICON Health & Fitness, the largest maker of home fitness equipment in the world and the company behind NordicTrack and ProForm. We built an app for their treadmills and a running app that tracked distance, pace and heart rate, back when Strava was still getting started and years before anyone was streaming a class into a living room. Connected fitness was not a category yet. This was a screen bolted to a treadmill and an app trying to make a run into something you would come back to. It went well enough that they handed us the website too. The Webby, the W3 Silver and one of the FWAs came out of this work.

Learnings—Key takeaways

• —

  An agency is the fastest way to learn how businesses work

  A new client every few months is a new business model, a new customer and a new set of constraints. You learn to read a business fast because you have no choice. I have used that everywhere since.

• —

  Knowing how the business makes money changes the design

  Sitting in those meetings you hear where a client’s money comes from, what they are worried about and what they are actually buying, and you start designing for the parts that decide whether the business works. The growth work I did later ran on the same instinct.

• —

  Good work attracts more work

  St. Joseph County came to us because they saw the Salt Lake City site. Nobody pitched them. The work found the next client on its own.