We’re super-excited to be kicking-off several new product UX projects this month. One is a consumer app and the other is enterprise but both are applications that lots of people will use everyday.

As with many of our product-focused projects, both are in stealth mode so we can’t name any names but stay tuned for more details.

We’ve also been growing our team. We’re working with several new designers, developers and producers who are helping 17FEET continue to do great work. We’re always looking for talented folks to join our team. We’d love to hear from you.

Check out our current job openings.

17FEET is super excited to announce the redesign and launch of the Next10 California Budget Challenge. The site allows Californians to try their hand at making the tough choices associated with the state’s budget crisis.

The project is the culmination of 4 months of research, usability testing, design and development working along side the great team at Next10, who sponsor the challenge.

One of the realizations we had early on as we talked to the people using the Budget Challenge was that half the audience wanted more information with deeper dives into policy data while the other half simply wanted a high level primer on the state budget and choices involved to fix it.

With that as our Challenge, 17FEET set out to create a multi-layered interface that would allow someone taking the Challenge to get the basics, while providing access to deeper data for the policy folks to sink their teeth into.

We’re happy with the result and in the end we hope we helped to shed a little bit of light in how we can all educate ourselves and help fix our states budget woes.

Think you’ve got what it takes to balance the California state budget?

Give it a try!

We’ve all heard about Google’s 20% time and hack days at start ups and agencies as a way to create an innovative culture, innovative work and to quite simply – and maybe most importantly – to make cool stuff.

At 17FEET we’ve aways had a culture of making stuff from custom designer toys to t-shirts. In a few hours we once designed and built a mobile web app that locates oyster happy hours around you, and we’re currently working on a iPhone app centered around discovering great cocktails- what’s not to love about that?  The point is, I think it’s important not to just do design as work, but to always be thinking and making. It might be cooking, drawing, sewing, or iOS development, but it all feeds the creative beast and the great studios understand this and cultivate it.

What are your thoughts on designing outside of the realms of client work? Are there good examples of successful applications or businesses that came out of this type of culture?Onward and upward. Go make something!