About Big Medium
We do big design. Big Medium is a digital agency that helps complex organizations design for what’s next. We build design systems, craft exceptional online experiences, and transform digital organizations.
The internet is a mighty big medium. It spreads not only across platforms and screens but into the physical world—and into all aspects of everyday life and business. Big Medium helps clients make daring leaps in how they seize the internet’s evolving opportunities—and confront its emerging challenges.
What we do: design at scale
We guide big companies doing big things. We combine strategy and practice to help our clients build the right products and build the products right.
- We build and evolve design systems for the world’s biggest companies.
- We help clients put artificial intelligence and machine learning to meaningful use.
- We design web and application interfaces across brands and product lines.
- We do organization design and change management to bust silos and help sprawling digital teams work better together.
- We craft product strategy for emerging technologies including AI, connected devices, and the latest web technologies.
- We provide education and inspiration via workshops, executive sessions, and keynote addresses.
Learn about our services, and check out our recent projects.
What we unlock: change
We help complex organizations level up. Lasting organizational change is always a key deliverable, and our clients say working with us is transformative. When we build together with client teams, we also do much more: we introduce new process; we remove friction and frustration; we reinforce collaborative culture; and we reveal new techniques and technologies. Your digital teams will be more nimble, more confident, and more effective for working with us.
The biggest brands
Our clients include a giant collection of the world’s best-known brands. including 10 percent of the Fortune 100 and counting. Here’s a small selection of recent clients:
We are unlike any other agency
We provide everything you’d expect from any full-service agency. We’ve won the expected collection of awards and accolades. We know how to run big projects. We can scale our teams quickly.
But we’re also totally different. Our people, ideas, perspectives, and goals are unusual among digital agencies. Here’s why…
Led by internet luminaries
When you work with Big Medium, you work closely with principals Josh Clark and Brad Frost—web trailblazers who shape the language and techniques of modern design and development. They literally wrote the books on Atomic Design, Sentient Design, and mobile UX. They have almost certainly architected and built more enterprise design systems than any team on the planet—and guided the evolution of dozens more.
Josh Clark
UX/product strategist,
Sentient Design co-author
Brad Frost
Technical strategist,
Atomic Design author
We created Atomic Design
Atomic Design is the methodology we created to build sturdy, reusable design systems. Big Medium’s Brad Frost wrote the book on Atomic Design, and it has since become the industry’s bible for designing the assets, process, and principles to drive successful design systems.
We know it’s working when we see improved efficiency, quality, and consistency, which are all hallmarks of Atomic Design.
We teach teams to fish
Our goal with every project is not only to deliver the promised outcome but to show our clients how to do it, too. Our aim is never to make clients dependent on us. On the contrary, we always seek to level up the teams we work with, so that our skills become theirs—and so that our client companies do not need to rely on external vendors. We are teachers as much as practitioners.
We know it’s working when the team has confidence to carry on the work on their own.
Orientation to action
We teach through demonstration and work out problems through explicit experimentation. We encourage process that favors parallel activity and cross-disciplinary collaboration, which shrinks timelines and delivers higher quality. We encourage companies to create design systems by building the roadmap projects they need to build anyway—instead of building a design system in the abstract and off to the side.
We know it’s working when we’re able to get down to doing the actual work—instead of talking about the work.
People + politics + process
The toughest challenges to building design systems or digital products are rarely their technical solutions. People are the hard part—the way we work, the habits we form, the politics we contend with.
A successful design system is tuned to the culture, hierarchy, incentives, and power structures of the organization. The work we do addresses this very human aspect of digital production, as well as the technical.
We know it’s working when we’ve reduced organizational frictions, eliminated barriers to collaboration, and accommodated fact-of-life power structures.
Multi-disciplinary collaboration
We’re big believers in breaking down the creative silos between disciplines, with a particular focus on improving designer/developer co-creation. In our worldview, design systems and digital projects become a platform for collaboration, where designers and developers work from the same source of truth, share a common vocabulary, and have opportunities to build interfaces together instead of designers pitching mockups over the wall.
We know it’s working when everyone is speaking the same language, there are fewer surprises, screens are built faster, and QA is much reduced.
True partnership
We are told that we are not only smart and talented—table stakes for a full-service agency—but that we are also kind... and fun to work with. That rings true, since we look for the same in our clients.
We become friends with the people we work with. We care about their challenges, and we are invested in their success. We are real allies in making their vision real.
We know it’s working when we’re all enjoying our work together, not only the results.
We’d love to meet you
Working on an interesting project, wrestling with a thorny problem, or leveling up your digital organization? Let’s talk! Learn about our services, and get in touch with us today.
Contact Josh Clark to get started:
josh@bigmedium.com
(401) 339–3381