About Us

October 12, 2011 • by colin

The last 10 years

We’ve made so many amazing things over the past 10 years! I love to think back with pride at some of our first projects as stresslimitdesign in the early 2000’s — interactive training software for postpartum moms, a European chamber orchestra, lots of other small businesses [robotics parts manufacturer, process improvement consultants, electric supply company, etc]. For this era we had this placeholder site.

Technical highlights include pre-AJAX XMLHTTPRequest using iframes, pre-javascript framework library [yes I mean before prototype.js existed], pre-WordPress blogging platform, all home-engineered. I love the advances in open source since then, it means so much less engineering by us, and more engineering by tons of people everywhere.

After a few years, 2 trends emerged in our successes: that our overly-attentive service and the far-reaching scope of our skills gave us better results in ventures where we worked at the very core of clients’ business models; and that those results worked best in 2 specific domains—thought leaders [authors and consultants who needed a high profile in their industry; eg. David Maister, Julien Smith, Chris Brogan, among others] and startups [especially those in the early stages of development; eg. Start Cooking]. We also got a new one-page interim site which highlighted our continued video work.

Since then we have worked for big names [an internal blogging project for Microsoft, an interactive html5 infographic for a FedEx blog] and lesser-known or emerging ones [too numerous to name]. We have also jumped deep into the open source word of WordPress as it has evolved, collaborating on several popular WordPress plugins [one of which has been chosen on the shortlist of WordPress.com VIP plugins]. The divergence in activity led us to reduce our “coming soon” page to a pretty minimal one, then one only slightly more elaborate.

All this and we never had a “real” website.

The last 10 weeks

Reading our past few posts we’ve obviously been “going through changes”. But that hasn’t stopped us from continuing to do amazing work for amazing folks. After helping TechCrunch with their recent relaunch, we have been consulting with the WordPress.com VIP Services team at Automattic to reposition their service offerings.

We’ve also taken on a brand launch strategy and build for local Good Marketing team N/A Creative, and are finishing up a WordPress plugin for an online social media services product with lots of clients in the WordPress.com VIP program [will announce the name when it launches].

The next 10 months

Bigger is not better. We need to stay small to stay awesome. We will be continuing to focus on one realm which has become our forté which is high-level WordPress technical implementation, but also leaving room to focus on everything.

Re-shaping our process to be highly based on ultra-organized project management, working with the group of experts in our extended family.

Collaborating with interesting people and organizations pushing the envelope where good design thinking meets technology and social innovation.