While I have freelanced off-and-on throughout my career, this August marked two years since my last job of working for someone else. In the first year, I designed as a freelancer with a variety of smaller companies. Towards the end of 2014, I met my partner, Jamie Emerson, and started a design agency in Boulder called Emerson Stone.

I loved my life while freelancing — in the first year of being independent, I made money, traveled around Europe and Central America, and spent time with my wife — but I wasn’t really fulfilled by the work I was creating. On smaller projects, timelines and scopes weren’t large enough to create exactly what I wanted, and on larger projects, I had too small of a voice to steer the overall direction. While those worries aren’t the case for everyone, it was enough motivation for me to dream of something bigger. I wanted to build a company that worked on every facet of a design project: research, identity, art direction, interfaces, and development to bring it to life. My background in interface design and art direction with Jamie’s expertise in engineering and UX research combined to foster the development of a full-fledged studio.

We started off our partnership with a series of great projects, becoming solvent within the first month, and setting up the company to start paying ourselves a salary. It felt like a natural extension of freelancing, but with the added benefit of seeing a best friend every day to talk about design minutiae. We had plans for the future, and started hiring on full-time designers and developers as our list of projects grew.