Hello and Good-Bye

It’s that time of year again, summer! Everything seems to change as we all get back to some level of normalcy post-SXSW; the weather is warmer, vacations arise, interns emerge, new clients join and existing clients launch! All of the above is certainly true here at nclud. The biggest change here is saying good-bye to employee number one! It’s true; our very own Dan Drinkard is going to now be a part of many exciting initiatives coming out of The Washington Post. If you thought Dan did some amazing things with his time at nclud, just keep an eye out! While we are of course sad to see him leave, we’re exciting to see where he is going.

Dan joined nclud when it was just two guys figuring out how to be an agency, that and how to get the air conditioning working in our first studio space! He, and his amazing wife, Andrea, put a lot of trust in us … and I am happy to say that we’ve done some amazing things since that first day. From going on the road and helping us win clients such as Marriott, PUMA, 1&1 and AOL to pushing us onto HTML5 when everyone else was talking XHTML 2.0 to even helping us go mobile; Dan has been there and always made sure we succeeded. We didn’t always agree, but we did always succeed.

From inception we’ve always believed in shaping our agency to reflect the skills of it’s talent; never asking the talent to be compromised to accommodate some prescribed agency description, or worse, an out-of-the-box job description. They say, “hire people smarter than you”; that is exactly what we did and that is exactly the direction Dan helped us go in. We’re a better and smarter agency, and we we’re happy to have had Dan for the time we did!

As we say good-bye to Dan, we are excited to announce our newest intern this summer; say hello to Ian Storm Taylor. Ian is our third intern, following Lauren Moon and Michael Dick. We get extremely excited when we find young, ambitious talented designers; Ian is no expectation to that. Ian is currently enrolled at Rhode Island School of design where he majors in Graphic Design. He has a passion for the visual and much appreciation for front-end development. While we hope he learns a lot during his time with us; it’s his Mario Kart that is the focus of improvement!

For those curious, there is no replacing Dan. As mentioned, we look for passion and talent and evolve accordingly. We’ll be hiring (are hiring) for anyone from an iPhone developer to an Art Director to JavaScript and/or PHP developer … it’s about finding the right person; someone smarter than us, someone who makes us better, perhaps even someone who redefines the notion of ‘us’.