Meet Sourcebits Design Team!
Hey everyone!
This is Piotr, VP of Design at Sourcebits. I’d like to take this opportunity and talk a little bit about our design team. Why would I do that? Well, to be honest — there’s quite a lot to brag about!
My goal when I was beginning to complete the team was to find the best people from different environments. I was aiming to gather an eclectic, diverse and multicultural group of individuals. I have a strong belief that this method allows to create a very specific mix: dynamic, unique, able to approach problems from many angles and unpredictable (in terms of ideas of course!) And this is what I’m looking for in design: raw energy, unique ideas, dynamic and quick adjustment to ever-changing conditions and last but not least — fun.
Today I’m proud to be able to say this — we have managed to do it. I believe we found some of the best designers out there. They come from various places on the planet. Some of them claim they come from other planets. They have completely different cultural backgrounds, habits and native languages. And believe me, they are talented!
So here they are, the All-Stars design team of Sourcebits (in alphabetical order so no one blames me for preferences!)
Adam Cartlidge (Ireland)
Adam has a quite unusual affinity for chaos. He designs websites which explode with energy, sudden clashes of colours and compositions which result with mind-bending results and neat typography. He also finds himself comfortable in any other type of design: throw it at him and he comes back with a hard (yet polished, ha) blow of creativity and sexiness. He learns very quickly and recently has proven immense iPhone UI design powers.
David Forgash (USA)
Also known as Dave-O, the mighty ruler of MacThemes forums. Dave is a little strange and we’re afraid of him. You rarely meet a person who has lasers instead of eyes, right? Well, Dave’s ability to find flaws and/or room for improvement in design is astounding. He’s been flooding us with epic rivers of feedback from day one. And being the geeks we are, we can’t get enough of it. He’s also a bit of a pixel gentleman – he chooses to push them gently instead of maniacally throwing around. The results are pleasing. And on time, yay!
Benjamin George (India)
Our young icon artist and iPhone UI designer. He juggles pixels with ease and grace. Has no fear when dealing with piling requirements and is always positive. He’s the good little spirit of the team.
Daniel Goffin (Germany)
Dan is certainly a one-of-a-kind. He started his adventure with pixels probably before the time began. Surfaced around 2004, when he shocked the whole Mac theming community with his completely unique approach to GUIKit’ting — Sweet Slumber theme. After that he was recognized by his illustrative and wonky icons, book covers for Classics iPhone app and finally a wide range of funky, scary, twisted toys. Now he’s diving back into UI and game design — sketching, brainstorming, drawing and researching.
Gary Jacob Howe (UK)
Gary came from brand and print design background, and converted into an excellent UI designer with grace and speed. These days, he’s becoming more and more independent. He initiates projects, recognizes requirements, panics and runs. But then we grab him, put back at his desk and he does magnificent job guiding clients through challenging projects, providing English-proper user interfaces and pretty visuals. Gary is versatile and comes up with so much initiative that sometimes I have to stop him!
Alessandro Marani (Italy)
We don’t know much about Alessandro except for the fact that he probably lives in Italy, he probably looks like Alec Baldwin and for sure he has amazing illustration talents. He’s secretly drawing, painting and animating very pretty and funny things with us…and we can’t wait to show it all to you.
Rick Patrick (UK)
The Ominous Richard, they call him. As he writes on his Twitter profile: “Bad design makes me all kinds of sad.” And that’s it. Rick has the unique ability to tell what’s right and what’s wrong. He’s on constant search for new experiences in the world of design. He does UI, visuals, web design, interactions, 3D…he can even script game events! Very passionate and uniquely creative.
Sourav Sagar Panda, Shemin Krishnan and Udaya Shankar (India)
The main heads of our 3D team. Don’t be misguided with that rather playful last name. Sourav is a pro of all pros as far as 3D design is concerned. He has polygons for breakfast and breathes with shaders. His observation skill is uniquely sharp and his feel for harmonious colours makes him a very good painter too. Shemin has a black belt in After-Effects-Aided-Reality-Bending and some rumors say that people saw him rigging a real human being. And Udaya is an entitled artist, shooting ideas and polygons with the speed of light.
Raghavendra Shet (India)
Raghav is one of these guys: he comes to the office in Bangalore, sits down quietly and without questions produces solid user interfaces and then dresses them up in wonderful visuals. Independent, open-minded and very eager to learn. It’s a kind of a person you need on your team if you want to remain sane. Oh, and also was the Gold Medalist in the 4th National Level All India Painting Competition in 2000!
Alexander Stremiakov and Alexander Tsibulski (Belarus and Russia)
Our another European secret weapon. Alex S. lives in Belarus. Alex T. lives in Russia. Both are heavy-weight interaction designers. And by heavy-weight I mean really serious. Like, they are ninjas. I’m not kidding, I saw them kill a whole city with their swords once. Their excellent analytic skills, ability to squeeze the last problem out of an interface and sharp eye for logical defects make our projects sensible, organized and highly usable. Their skills also make the whole development process easy to understand for both developers and the client.
Nikolay Verin (Russia)
Russia is taking over Sourcebits! Nikolay is an absolutely amazing icon designer. He has a degree in arts, loves to paint, listens almost exclusively to U2 and is kind enough to show his design process to the world by creating fantastically educational YouTube tutorials. We grabbed him, mesmerized by his attention to detail, feeling of depth, contrast and colors. Needless to say, we’re super happy to have this mad artist. Here’s to hope his skills will pour over to iOS UI design, where we hope Nikolay will shine.
Julian Wright, Saravana Prabhu, Jeevan Lazarus and Ashwin Dinesh (India)
This is our excellent 5-men-design-army. They kick out iOS UIs, slice resources like there’s no tomorrow, make pretty illustrations and generally keep up being badass designers all the time. All of them are silent, humble and undoubtedly — indispensable. Also, they usually complete their tasks ahead of deadlines. How cool is that!
Ding Yi and Neway Lau (China)
Two not-certainly-direct relatives of one of the Chinese emperors, Yi and Neway proud themselves to be the most efficient and paranoid iOS UI designers on this planet. Efficient, because they can kick an app the size of Baltimore in half an hour. Paranoid, because they notice flaws which aren’t even there and manage to correct them(!!) They’re two shiny stars in our constellation. We love them and we wish we could clone them.
And in the end… I’m not sure if it’s entirely appropriate but I’ll say it for the sake of completeness of the impression: yours truly won an Apple Design Award in 2006 and happens to be completely obsessed with details, organization and unusual solutions. I was also gifted with quite good communication skills which allow me to steer this ship with efficiency, intensity, discipline and fun.
So there — I hope you enjoyed this insight in our All-Stars team. I am very excited to work with these fantastic (and fanatic!) people and am confident that we will achieve truly outstanding things.
Now we’ll go back and have more fun with pixels, if you don’t mind.
