About Big Medium | Big Medium

The internet is a mighty big medium. Machine intelligence spreads not only across platforms and screens but into the physical world—shaping every aspect of life and business. Big Medium helps companies seize these emerging opportunities and navigate new challenges. We make big ideas real through product design, strategy, design, and organizational change.

What we do: design for what’s next

We guide big companies doing big things. We marry vision with practice to help our clients build the right products and build the products right.

We design web and application interfaces across brands and product lines.
We help clients understand artificial intelligence as design material for meaningful use.
We build and evolve design systems for the world’s biggest companies.
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 and perspective; 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 trailblazers

For 25 years our team has guided the industry not only through our work but our books, talks, courses, and generous sharing. We defined many of the UX best practices for web design, mobile, design systems, and now Sentient Design and AI-mediated experiences. When you work with Big Medium, you work closely with principal Josh Clark who literally wrote the books on mobile UX and Sentient Design. Big Medium has almost certainly architected and built more enterprise design systems than any team on the planet—and guided the evolution of dozens more.

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.

We created Sentient Design

Big Medium team is pioneering the best practices for AI-powered UX. Sentient Design is the form, framework, and philosophy for creating intelligent interfaces—AI-mediated experiences that are conceived in real time to match your needs and intent. Big Medium’s Josh Clark and Veronika Kindred are writing the book on Sentient Design, and their writings, talks, and ideas are shaping a new way to approach AI—as a new kind of design material for weaving intelligent interfaces.

We know it’s working when we see companies making their digital products dramatically more valuable through radically adaptive experiences.

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