Hire Us | Big Medium

We do big design

We help complex organizations design, build, and ship digital products at scale. Nearly all of our engagements include delivery of production-ready design and code, but our engagements also do much more: we help our clients coordinate digital efforts across brands, disciplines, and products.

We are excellent at building. But we also make meaningful change in how you build. We go deep with you on product strategy. We refine design and development process. We reimagine UX and interaction design. We untangle team resourcing. We energize culture. We break down barriers to collaboration. We create clear rules for governance. We help you understand and adopt emerging technology.

We design what’s next. Our specialty is helping you turn a corner to adopt new process, technology, and perspective to help you build bigger and better. If that’s what you’re trying to do, we’d love to work with you. Review our recent projects.

Sweet-spot projects

Our engagements are flexible in size and scope. Common projects include:

Plan, build, and evolve a design system
Imagine, design, and ship a new digital product
Reinvent an existing website or application with a new design, platform, or emerging technology
Create literacy and competency in new technology and process (oh hello, AI!)

Design systems

We build design systems for the world’s biggest companies. A design system is a library of solved problems, delivered in both design and code. It provides common components, patterns, guidelines, and standards to describe how your organization delivers user interfaces.

We have almost certainly architected and built more enterprise design systems than any team on the planet—and guided the evolution of dozens more. Big Medium principal Brad Frost wrote the book on Atomic Design, and it has since become the industry’s bible for designing the assets, process, and principles to drive successful design systems.

Building a new design system? We’ll help you get started with the planning and foundational architecture, and then tuck in with your team to help you build it.
Got an established system that’s struggling? We’ll improve adoption, process, contribution, standards, and construction methods.
Trying to unify multiple systems? We’ll help you architect and implement a single solution to support multiple brands, products, and platforms.

Interface and experience design

We design and deliver remarkable digital experiences for connected devices, websites, and apps. Our process is both deep and nimble; we deliver products born from rigorous research and implemented with speed and the latest techniques. Our teams are made up of the industry’s best designers, developers, and researchers. We deliver on time and on budget.

Digital strategy and process

We craft product strategy, hone delivery process, and unlock what’s-next innovation . Imagining the next big thing for your organization? Figuring out what AI means for your business and products? Struggling to get your teams to run in the same direction? Reinventing what you do online? Sorting out governance of design or development standards? These are problems we’ve solved for dozens of companies. We can help.

Engagement size and scope

Our engagements are flexible, varying from one-day workshops to full build-it-with-you production engagements. All of our client work focuses on teaching teams to fish: by working together, our knowledge becomes your knowledge. Here are a few of our common engagement models:

Full production and co-creation

We field full production teams that include researchers, designers, front-end developers, back-end engineers, documentarians, and project managers. These teams can build design systems, websites, applications, and more. While we can build things for you, we prefer to build things with you. We love to collaborate with product teams to lead production work that we take on together. Along the way, we teach by demonstration to help level-up your team. Depending on the project, a production engagement is a three- to twelve-month project.

Action plan

Before you set off on your journey, it helps to know where you’re going and how. An action plan engagement is an eight- to ten-week project that delivers recommendations to solve the problem at hand—and begins to put them into practice. Whether you’re trying to figure out what’s next for your design system, for implementing AI, or for crafting a crisp brand or product strategy, an action plan gives you the clarity and knowledge to tackle the project.

This is more than a PowerPoint deck or a hand-wavey strategy; we emphasize the “action” in action plan. We deliver our recommendations midway through the engagement and spend the rest of the time actually putting them into action with you—and creating foundational assets together. You wind up not only with a roadmap of strategic and tactical recommendations, but you also get started on the production and skills to put that roadmap into action. Here’s what we do:

Conduct an assessment of technical and design assets, code architecture, documentation, release schedule, and overall product strategy.
Have conversations with stakeholders, team members, and users to understand challenges and opportunities for the project.
Deliver the action plan outlining strategic, tactical, and organizational actions for the project.
Shape a roadmap outlining what needs to happen over the next 12 months—and the process, governance, and resources you’ll need along the way.
Lead working sessions to begin putting the recommendations into action by building things together.

Coaching and hands-on advice

We do retainer arrangements of four to twelve weeks with our principals Josh Clark and Brad Frost to provide ongoing strategic and technical advice. This is a blend of standing office hours with Josh and Brad, along with hands-on working sessions to go deep on specific topics that are vexing you.

Workshops, talks, and executive sessions

Our whole team are educators. All of us, including principals Josh Clark and Brad Frost, offer a variety of formats to inspire and educate your team or event.

Our workshops help designers, developers, and managers level-up their process and technique. We offer half-day, full-day, or two-day formats at conferences, in private settings, or remote via video conference.

We also deliver 30–90 minute talks at conferences and internal events to inspire and educate designers, developers, and executives. If you’re trying to win hearts and minds to a design system, to introduce the possibilities of AI, or jumpstart new process and perspective, we can help spark that change. Our presentations are as much performance as keynote, and our talks are at once hilarious, practical, and galvanizing.

Common topics include:

Building and evolving design systems
Understanding and implementing machine learning and AI
Adopting faster, more reliable design/development processes
Designing exceptional product experiences
Prototyping next-generation interfaces

Let's talk

Get in touch to ask us how we can help you be even more awesome.

Contact Josh Clark to get started:
josh@bigmedium.com
(401) 339–3381