Wednesday May 7, 2008
Welcome to 404.
Yeah, we’re at it again.
404UXD, formerly The Geniant Blog, is the new home of our Dallas-based user experience group. For those of you following along at home, you’ll know that in the latest episode of our little telenovela we (Geniant) were acquired by EMC last July. And prior to that, in 2006, Geniant acquired Bright Corner, which company was more or less the humble genesis of our UX group.
The 404 Blog will continue to publish articles about web design, development and other web-centric topics and will also adopt a tumblelog-style format for posting smaller bits of ephemera. We hope you dig it!
So What’s With This “404” Business? Sounds Awfully Pretentious, Man.
Funny story: Back in 2006, when those of us still working in the old Bright Corner offices were packing up our junk to be moved into the newly-finished Geniant offices, we asked around to find out what room number we should label our crates with so that they would end up in the right place. Wanna guess what room number we were told we’d be moving in to? Hearty LOLs ensued, along with plenty of brainstorming for jokes and anecdotes that could be told using this awesome mashup of the real world and web nerdery.
Pithy remarks aside, the numbers “404” have been a permanent part of our UX group’s identity ever since. Not everyone gets it, and that has made it a source of camaraderie among us. The clock on our wall is frozen in time at 4:04, and every once in a while some kind soul puts batteries in it and fixes the time, only to come in the next day to find that we have removed the batteries and set the clock back to our magic numbers. Confusion.
It’s A Lot Like Letting Your Son Wear Eyeliner And Combat Boots.
Merging with Geniant and EMC has not been painless. That’s to be expected. But it’s truly a testament to both of these companies’ desire to promote and encourage UXD that they have not only allowed but encouraged our group to publish openly on the web. I’ve come to realize that we’ve been handed a free pass on many an occasion where others would have been denied. Big thanks go to our higher-ups for going to bat for us and allowing us to do what it takes to build and maintain a positive culture for our team.
We hope you (continue to) enjoy our blog!
Comments on “Welcome to 404.”
EMC helps organizations create superior IT environments, from infrastructure solutions all the way up to software development and user experience design.
Learn more…About This 404er
Jared Christensen
Jared is a quiet fellow with strong opinions. As an all-round user experience designer, Jared makes sure that interfaces are human-friendly, emotive, aesthetically pleasing, clear, on-brand and usable – with a touch of mellow smoothness. He also fancies himself to be somewhat of a writer, but sadly he has little to say.
Great stuff guys. I’m looking forward to how the tumblelog style works out.