We the Media, a Portland, Oregon-based web agency and product shop, is looking to add a full-time front-end engineer to our team.
We are looking for someone local, but we’re happy to help the right person relocate. Portland is a great place to live anyway, so this could be your excuse to move here!
Responsibilities:
- Working closely with the designers and back-end developers to ensure interfaces are implemented to perfection
- Writing standards compliant, maintainable and reusable code (HTML/CSS)
- Getting things looking and working as good as possible in IE7+
- Generating highly optimized images (sprites welcome!) from complex PSDs for speedy loading
- Creating organized, efficient JavaScript to nail interactions using jQuery/CoffeeScript
- Producing mobile-friendly versions of projects
Necessary skills:
- The drive to get every pixel in just the right spot
- Advanced jQuery knowledge — bonus points for doing so using CoffeeScript
- A slight OCD for creating elegant code and keeping it that way
- The magical ability to get things looking and working right in IE (7 and above)
- An intereste in, or even the knowledge of, Backbone.js, NodeJS or backend languages (Ruby/Rails primarily)
- Motivation to stay up-to-date on the latest techniques
- Ability to make us laugh at a joke, cry at a story and kick our asses in foosball. Or just being a good, friendly person
About We the Media
The company was founded 4 years ago in a garage and has evolved into a profitable agency with an overworked foosball table. We focus on projects that matter for companies like Nike where we can provide full solutions, from concept to development, to provide the best possible outcome.
We’re a thoroughly design- and UX-driven company. From the designers to the back-end developers, everyone here is passionate about going the extra mile to nail interactions and make sure every pixel is just right.
It’s incredibly important to us to maintain that culture. We look for people that are positive, highly motivated by the work, can be supportive of the rest of the team and also laugh at (and make) stupid jokes.
Shoot us an email telling us about yourself, why you’re interested in the job, links to stuff you’ve built (your GitHub profile will do the trick if you have it), any questions you have for us and your resume. Thanks for your time!
We the Media, a Portland, Oregon-based web agency and product shop, is looking to add an associate digital producer to our small team.
We are looking for someone who’s motivated, talented and a pleasure to work around. The person for this position will start as an Associate Producer, but it is expected that their talent will quickly propel them into more of a lead role. WTM Producers are our jack of all trades. They maintain both project management and client and team relationships. Our Producers work closely with the rest of the team to maintain schedules, budgets and a creative, positive atmosphere to deliver the best possible project.
We are looking for someone local, but we’re happy to help the right person relocate. Portland is a great place to live anyway, so this could be your excuse to move here!
Responsibilities include:
- working closely with the account manager on all projects
- assist with scoping and writing project proposals, requirements briefs, budgets and timelines
- interface between the client and internal team on projects to assist with strategy, clearly outlining requirements, managing expectations and deliverables
- oversee multiple, concurrent projects from strategy to launch (and all steps in between) to deliver an amazing piece of work on time and within budget
Necessary skills include:
- ability to handle multiple projects and tasks at once
- familiarity with working in a team design/development environment
- effective communication and writing skills
- hard-working, self-starting, and positive
- obsessively detail oriented
- knowledge of and passion for web and mobile technologies
- familiarity with best practices as well as with qa testing and browser discrepancies
About We the Media
The company was founded 4 years ago in a garage and has evolved into a profitable agency with an overworked foosball table. We focus on projects that matter for companies like Nike where we can provide full solutions, from concept to development, to provide the best possible outcome.
We’re a thoroughly design- and UX-driven company. From the designers to the back-end developers, everyone here is passionate about going the extra mile to nail interactions and make sure every pixel is just right.
It’s incredibly important to us to maintain that culture. We look for people that are positive, highly motivated by the work, can be supportive of the rest of the team and also laugh at (and make) stupid jokes.
Position is in-house and contract-to-hire, salary based on experience. If this sounds like you, send us an email to jobs “at” wtmworldwide.com with your resume, any relevant links and a bit about you.
Here’s a quick introduction to the fine folks at WTM. With summer winding down it seemed appropriate to do a quick summer poll of everyone. This is it, this is us. This is where the magic happens. This is who is behind the magic.
George: Mastermind. Keeps great ideas flowing, keeps everyone happy. Recent new daddy.
Favorite Portland restaurant: Pok Pok
Favorite thing to do in Portland in the summer: Grow vegetables and build things
Jeff: Keeps great ideas flowing, and makes amazing design magic. Recently spotted dodging paparazzi after his amazing rendition of “Friends in low places”.
Favorite Portland restaurant: hard to say. Genie’s maybe?
Favorite thing to do in Portland in the summer: dance like no one is watching. also, drink beerz.
James: Resident celebrity as drummer for the Caps band. Get their album! Makes sh*t happen. Also acquired a new home over the Summer.
Favorite Portland restaurant: Liberty Glass
Favorite thing to do in Portland in the summer:
Take long strolls to and from work thinking about the inner workings of the universe.
Chris: Latest and greatest. Well the latest anyway (as everyone here is great) but he’s the newest member of our team. Also throws amazing BBQs.
Favorite Portland restaurant: Pok Pok
Favorite thing to do in Portland in the summer: Hanging out by a campfire
Dan: Latest and greatest. Well the latest anyway (in the literal sense). Incredibly talented designer and pretty quiet guy; unless it comes to soccer, particularly the Portland Timbers.
Favorite Portland restaurant: Pok Pok/Pambiche
Favorite thing to do in Portland in the summer: Timbers matches! (In case the above wasn’t clear enough).
Jordan: Exploring his way through Portland on foot, he always treats us with amazing photos of his adventures every Monday morning.
Favorite Portland restaurant: Red Onion?
Favorite thing to do in Portland in the summer: Sitting as still as possible on while achieving as much as possible.
Gorman: You want to talk about magic? Not only can this guy code like no one I’ve ever seen, he’s also a very talented singer/songwriter. Wait till you hear his rendition of “Happy Birthday”, and his #1 single, “Sheridan’s”, soon to be released.
Favorite Portland restaurant: Pok Pok/Lucky Strike
Favorite thing to do in Portland in the summer: Riding bikes with his girlfriend along the river
Matt: Our wonderful Canadian neighbor to the North, soon to be joining us in house, and we couldn’t be happier. He doesn’t like answering questions like the below, so here’s his best shot:
Favorite Portland restaurant: Le Happy or Lucky Strike
Favorite thing to do in Portland in the summer: Oregon Brewers Festival
Kate: When not being outdoorsy, Kate spent the Summer beating the heat by lounging by her pool and working on her tan. At WTM she kept the cadence going as we fired out two big updates to two of our client projects; right on time as usual.
Favorite Restaurant: Oba
Favorite thing to do: Windsurfing!
Our client, Win Forever, just recently finished their last event of 2011 (of five total) and we were asked to come along to help with their streaming endeavors. They spent the evening going over Pete Carroll’s coaching philosophy and how to prepare yourself mentally to coach a team of athletes. It’s inspiring stuff; even for us Internet people!
Our initial goal was to simply live stream their Seattle coaches workshop on winforever.com – we worked with UStream and the Win Forever team to make it happen.
We the Media handled the creative – touts on winforever.com and the creative for the UStream channel. Within the tout, we embedded a UStream player and let them do their magic with their streaming services. The video production was coordinated through a third party up in Seattle.
Technically, there wasn’t much to it, but live streaming events definitely require a lot of logistical finesse! There was coordination needed across three cities – Portland, LA and Seattle with a few different parties: with the Win Forever team on details and design approvals; coordination with another third party about getting the UStream details in order; coordination with UStream to get all the correct pages in place; coordination with the Seattle Seahawks social media team; and coordination up in Seattle with the production guys as well as the WTM team in Portland once this went live, to make sure everything launched on time and worked the way it should.
I knowwwwww!
Can you believe, me, the doer of all things, went up to Seattle to make sure everything ran smoothly? I even got to meet the man himself – Pete Carroll!
The Win Forever team was super happy with the results, as there were over 21,000 total views throughout the four-hour event. Yogi Roth, was taking live questions from Twitter throughout the event, and one question came from someone in Boston who stayed up until 1 am EST to watch the entire workshop!
The recorded live broadcast will soon be posted to winforever.com, so check back soon to check it out!
We the Media, a Portland, Oregon-based web agency and product shop, is looking to add a full-time developer to our small team. There are 10 of us in total, 4 of which are developers.
We’re always looking for the best tool for the job, but we currently use:
- Ruby 1.9 / Rails 3
- MySQL, Mongo and Redis
- An increasing amount of NodeJS
- Tons of JavaScript coded in CoffeeScript
- Macs to build it, Ubuntu VPSs / Heroku / AWS (depending on the project) to serve it
The company was founded 3 years ago in a garage and has evolved into a profitable agency with an overworked foosball table. We focus on projects for companies like Nike where we can provide full solutions, from concept to development, to provide the best possible outcome. We’ve used profits from that work to fund the development of our first major product, Opal. Our work and more info about us can be found here on our site, and a few details about Opal can be found at http://ouropal.com (we’ll tell you more when we talk).
We’re a thoroughly design- and UX-driven company. From the designers to the back-end developers, everyone here is passionate about going the extra mile to nail interactions and make sure every pixel is just right. Between that level of work and the fact that we’re building a huge product along side our client work with a small team, we often find ourselves working long hours. Honestly though, we love it — we’re an extremely tight-knit team that’s very passionate about our work.
It’s incredibly important to us to maintain that culture. We’re looking for someone that’s positive, highly motivated by the work, can be supportive of the rest of the team and also laugh at (and make) stupid jokes. We are looking for someone local, but we’re happy to help the right person relocate. Portland is a great place to live anyway, so this could be your excuse to move here!
Shoot us an email telling us about yourself, why you’re interested in the job, links to stuff you’ve built (your GitHub profile will do the trick), any questions you have for us and your resume. Thanks for your time!
Yes, we’ve been off the radar for a while now, but that just means we’ve been really busy. Busy doing very, very awesome things.
Recently we launched a website for Pete Carroll’s Win Forever program. You can wander over here and take a look. It’s an ongoing venture with a bright future ahead of it. We are also in the process of launching a really awesome project for Nike Soccer, which is sure to turn some heads (stay tuned for more on this one). Most importantly, we are bustling away, working hard on Opal. We are polishing every pixel and optimizing every line of code, shooting for an early summer launch.
Between all that, we’ve been digging in a little more into the Portland web community. There were two fun and successful design meet-ups, hosted at the WTM office and organized by Josh Pyles. In March, we participated in Demolicious at Backspace. Jeff and Gorman showed off Opal to the creative masses, highlighting key features and blazing fast push notification technologies (too bad the wireless couldn’t keep up!).
Life at We the Media isn’t all dark rooms filled with code libraries and humongous PSD files, we also know how to get down and have some fun. A day doesn’t pass without a couple foosball games. On our days off, we like to take day trips to the Pacific coast and Multnomah Falls. Some of us are proud members of the Timbers Army. The NHL playoffs have regularly been watched in the lounge. In short, if you find yourself in Southeast Portland, stop on by and we will drop everything to delight and entertain you.
We’re very excited about where we are headed, and as always we are on the lookout for more talent. Right now, we are particularly salivating for a Rails developer, as well as another Interface Designer. If you think you can hang with the best, have an insatiable desire to do top notch work, all while stressing over your foosball record, drop us a line. We want to hear from you.
We promise to be in touch in the near future! Stay tuned…
It’s that time again, we’re expanding; growing bigger. With that comes job opportunities to join an already talented team. One must ask themselves, “what can I bring to the table?” If you think you have what it takes, we’d love to have you join us. Job openings below.
Design Team
Interface Designer
We want to find someone who’s motivated, talented and a pleasure to work around to join our design team.
Necessary skills include:
- web design background with a specialty in UI / UX (please have a portfolio/body of work to show off)
- HTML/CSS mastery and a solid, useful knowledge of jQuery/Javascript
- familiarity with working in a team design/development environment
- hard-working, self-starting, and positive
- obsessively detail oriented and a love to iterate
Nice to have:
- more in-depth programming knowledge (we’re a Rails shop, FWIW)
Position is in-house and contract-to-hire, salary based on experience. If this sounds like you, send us an email to jobs “at” wtmworldwide.com with your portfolio, any relevant links and a bit about you.
Quality Assurance / Junior Project Manager
We want to find someone who’s motivated, talented and a pleasure to work around.
Necessary skills include:
- ability to handle multiple projects at once
- familiarity with working in a team design/development environment
- hard-working, self-starting, and positive
- obsessively detail oriented
- familiarity with browser discrepancies
Position is in-house and contract-to-hire, salary based on experience. If this sounds like you, send us an email to jobs “at” wtmworldwide.com with your resume, any relevant links and a bit about you.
When starting the WE Portal project we had no idea that it would become a beautifully blossoming beast with a deep variety of function and layout. With this came a need for many different buttons, calls to action, entry fields, touts, icons, and fonts at varying sizes. Up until recently Jeff and I (designers) would come up with these elements as we needed them. If we wanted a drop down we would make one; if we needed a new tout then we would make it — so on and so on. There is continuity throughout the site but by working this way it was still possible to have unique elements that the the front end team (James, Gorman, Jordan, Dan and George) would have to make every time they put these designs into production.
Until now.
We now have a marvelous document (thanks to Dan) that is a live functioning style guide. All the elements of the site and their on/off states, fonts (head, sub-head and body), size and color all live within this PSD to make everyone’s life easier. The designers no longer have to redraw elements. The front end team doesn’t have to cut out images and recut out images and recut out images.
As an example, let’s take this button (below) and walk through how this is applied to our work flow.
James (front end developer) took this button and made a sprite (below), a flat image that combines multiple segments to render a dynamic expandable shape by the browser.
The button is cropped to a predefined length that’s written into the div set around the button.
The sprite is then referenced again for the the button’s end cap and is aligned to where the button was cropped.
This results in a seamless button that can dynamically change length according to the text inside it.
If a 175 px–wide button says “DONATE TODAY”, but needs to be changed to “DONATE NOW”, we no longer design a new button — we simply go into the code and edit the text to say “DONATE NOW” and the browser automatically adjusts the button to 160 px wide, accommodating the new text.
Typically, with this many variations of a button throughout the site it would require lots of server calls for each of these images. Now this sprite is loaded ONCE and used again and again each time that kind of button is needed. This technique is used for all of the expandable elements on the site, drastically reducing load time and giving a clean, fast way to update.
A technique that I really enjoy using for rounding the corners of block-level elements is border-radius. This technique is used throughout the We The Media website (as you may have noticed). Implementing border-radius isn’t too hard, though the code is a bit heavy as different browsers require specific CSS (i.e. -moz- for Firefox and -webkit- for Safari/Chrome). I don’t want to get into the actual code for this, but good examples can be found at The Art of Web and The W3C.
I find this little bit of code very handy for easily adding rounded corners. In the past, I used to add extra divs to make rounded cornered boxes extendible in the code. The major drawback is that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer browsers (big surprise there), but I am willing to have it gracefully degrade.
Ok, so this doesn’t work in IE, but the good folks at HTMLremix have been working on a solution for this problem. They have developed the “Curved-Corner” project that just requires you to add an .htc file and link it in the CSS (as far as I can tell), but I have not been having much luck (though I haven’t tried very hard yet). The .htc file is available at Google Code. If you have gotten this to work, feel free to drop a comment and share your knowledge. For now, I am not too worried about this working on IE (at least for this site).
According to CSS3.info, Microsoft does say that they will be supporting CSS3 in their upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser. Let’s all hope, but for now we have plenty of other good browsers to use that support this cool attribute.
Todd Q measuring wood things
We launched the first WTM site in November of 2007, the night before we had a meeting with the fine founders of Odopod. We had to show them something to prove our legitimacy. Odopod threw us a quick Nike gig and the site did its job. Then it really didn’t change much after that. WTM however, did.
We’ve officially gone official; office, employees, clients, and project managers. Oh yes, AND creatives – but we always had that. Our old site reflected the ideals of a network of creatives. While the soul of that WTM still exists, the new WTM is no longer a loose band of merrymakers – but a tight one. We landed new projects; big ones. Projects that needed military-like precision. In essence, we had to grow up. I have no qualms, we’ve been extremely fortunate.
I’d like to talk more about the process in which this site evolved to it’s current state and how the office was built, but I’ll leave that post to Jeff and Todd, respectively. With the site I will say we took our sweet ass time and got it right. After all, that’s what it takes to do great work, and if anything we do great work.