Welcome James Mathias, Chief Creative Officer
Posted by Leslie Camacho on May 26, 2011
Please welcome James Mathias, Chief Creative Officer for EllisLab. James has a formal job description but the short version is that he is EllisLab’s champion of User Experience.
During the course of our search for a Designer/UI/UX specialist it became clear that we had the opportunity to bring someone to EllisLab capable of making all of us better at user experience. We set out looking for someone with the design chops to improve ExpressionEngine’s Control Panel and we ended up with someone capable of modernizing EllisLab’s approach to creative development, built around a commitment to the user experience.
James brings with him 10+ experience in UX, UI, and web development, including working as a Senior UX Developer for Amazon’s Kindle Group. He’s comfortable with HTML/CSS, loves jQuery, and has enough PHP chops to code his own CMS. But what put James over the top was his commitment to the Community and making life on the internet better.
During our first interview I asked James why we wanted to leave a very good job to work for a small upstart company and without hesitation he said, “I want to make the internet better and I know I can do that at EllisLab better than anyplace else. I want to make that difference in people’s lives, help tell their story… I’m meant for this job.” He said it with all sincerity, not a quaver in his voice.
Several weeks later having outlasted 150+ candidates, survived The Impossible Task (to be described in a later post), and been grilled by our staff, it became obvious just how sincere James was in that commitment. After a long in person interview in Seattle, he persuaded me to take the risk and bring him on in such a way that he’d have the authority and leeway to do what needs doing to make EllisLab a user experience focused company, something we started out being but drifted away from.
I want to thank our entire staff for being so passionate and involved throughout this process. We have a commitment from every single person to make you, the person using our software, websites, and support, everyday our focus.
James officially starts on June 6th, but he has informed me that you are welcome to inundate him with CP requests starting right now. You may do so by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or hitting him up on Twitter (jmathias).
