Ian Storm Taylor, W.T.F.

Ever since we hired our first employee here at nclud we’ve embraced the idea of summer interns. And we’ve had some amazing talent come through the door in the past three years. This year is no exception; at the start of the year we received a very interesting email from a second year undergrad student at Rhode Island’s School of Design (RISD), from one Ian Storm Taylor.

The email was typical enough, quick to the point and full of politeness. However, what wasn’t typical was the portfolio of work; the site was well designed (especially for a 19 year old ‘graphic designer’), but it was everything else that caught our attention. It was clear from first impression that this kid got “design”; he was without a doubt a designer and had an eye for the aesthetic. But at nclud we don’t typically need “designers”, we need “web designers” … and that term means something very specific to us, something we could see in Ian’s portfolio. In his blog he talks about HTML5 and CSS3, he asks the right questions and questions the right things. His mark-up was clean and semantic; it was beautiful. It was clear he understood mark-up and more apparent that like many true designers he strived to keep his code pure while never losing sight of his design intentions; even using relatively new technologies (at the time) such as TypeKit. Ian is a designer, but it’s the web designer in him that we saw, that got us excited!

All first impressions aside, he’s a young designer just getting into the web game; so we kept expectations low and assumed he’d get more out of working with us than we did working with him; this is one of those moments where I am happy to be wrong. After a week or so of concepting some ideas for us on an internal project, we threw him right into it … and the dude can swim! Ian stepped right up on a project with one of our largest clients to-date, a client who demands the best of design and even better of the mark-up. His designs were great and exceeded all expectations; but who knew sitting right here in our studio would be another amazing front-end talent. Working closely with our own David Desandro, we watched as they both continued to impress us with the capabilities of, and pushing the limits of, HTML5 and CSS3; their JavaScript isn’t too shabby either!

Continuing to be full of talent driven surprises, Ian recently impressed us with his design and front-end skills via his entry into the An Event Apart 10k challenge, “10k Apart”. Ian’s “Matchuppps” elegantly taps into the Dribbble API to create a “A basketball-themed memory card game”; also utilizing jQuery, TypeKit and some fantastic CSS3 techniques … all under 10k too!

Today is unfortunately the last day for Ian at nclud; summer is over and Ian is headed back to Rhode Island to kick off his third-year. We’re excited to have Ian as a part of the nclud team and hope to continue to work with him. He even turned out to be one hell of a Mario Kart player; trust us, he’s come a long way since June.

If you’re not already doing so, be sure to follow Ian on Twitter @stormink and Dribble at http://dribbble.com/players/stormink. We are expecting great things from Ian.