As a Partner, I filled a variety of roles at Teehan+Lax. New business, client relations, creative direction, recruitment, strategy, and design thinking to name but a few. The company was divided into 3 cross-functional teams, with mine comprised of visual & interaction designers, developers, motion-artists, copywriters and product managers. At the time, about 50% of the staff reported to me and I was responsible for over 60% of our annually billings. 

Shortly before Teehan+Lax closed their doors, I had decided to move on and to try my hand in the startup world. But during the 6 years I spent at T+L, there isn't a single moment that I don't look back fondly on. While we produced many amazing things (some of which are highlighted below), I would say that Teehan+Lax itself represents one of my greatest career accomplishments. From our single office in Toronto, we managed to build a global reputation for superior digital craftsmanship. We also proudly assembled an amazing team, many of which have gone on to companies like Facebook, Slack, Uber and Apple.

Readability

Readability turns any web page into a clean view for reading now or later on your computer, smartphone, or tablet. It had started as a hobby project inside of New York based Arc90, but quickly grew into a full featured Web service. However they were struggling to get an app into the App Store, and in early 2012 they approached us about partnering with them to build all of their mobile apps.

We were game, but we wanted to do more than just fix what they had submitted previously. We thought there was an opportunity to build the best reading app possible. We saw an huge opportunity to make reading on the Web better. So we collectively agreed to start from scratch. 

Read more about the Readability story here: http://www.teehanlax.com/story/readability/

TweetMag

TweetMag came out of a brainstorming session in spring of 2010. It was an iPad and iPhone app that took twitter feeds and turned them into wonderfully simple magazines. It worked by finding links shared by a twitter user, in a list or search – then grabbed their headlines, abstracts and media to create a TweetMag. Articles then become prioritized by what was being tweeted about most.

It was our first real attempt at building a mobile product, and needless to say, it was quite the learning experience. While we did eventually ship TweetMag, it was horribly behind schedule, grossly over budget, and wasn't nearly as polished as we would have liked. We also didn't appreciate what was really doable on the original iPad hardware, which caused the app to perform somewhat poorly.

Nonetheless, the idea was sound and you can still see glimmers of it in products like Nuzzel and Flipboard.

Upcoming

Upcoming was an experiment we created inside of T+L Labs, that focused on reimagining how a calendar might work on your iPhone. Instead of visualizing a day as you traditionally would with uniform hour-blocks, we instead settled on a presentation that stripped away as much noise as possible. We visually compressed past and unscheduled time to focus only on the upcoming events.

This was both a design and development exercise for us, and while we did built a prototype, we never released it as an app. But, we did open source it!