My heroes in the Irish web industry

I make no apologies for calling the Irish web industry a joke. It is. And a reasonable man would see so with the experience and information I’ve fought for during my career. It’s populated with old, tired, passionless, apathetic and generally shit companies. But amongst these thrive a small few that really care and give me hope. These are the companies that inspire me and the people I want to match. These are my heroes in the Irish web industry.

Hero: Spoiltchild

Spoiltchild was founded in late 2003 by Alan O’Rourke, who previously worked as a web designer for Spin Solutions. It’s a four-man (well, three men and a lady) company at the moment. Alan says he plans to add two to the team this year and further develop their new email marketing application, Toddle; an app that after only six weeks online, started making money!

I know Alan and Bartek Czerwinski, the second web designer in the company, quite well and respect them for their understated passion and talent. They don’t shout and moan and wave their arms around like me, they just do good work. Spoiltchild have a few smaller side-projects going too, like Here by Dragons, Weddings by Adam, When is my Wedding, The Wedding Library, Sheepstealer Clothing and Spoilt. The latter is a design blog (lacking attention, unfortunately) that Alan keeps to highlight, quite selflessly, Irish design talent. He featured yours truly back in the day which was one of the main catalysts for my grand ambitions. Thanks, Alan.

Hero: iQ Content

iQ Content was founded in 2001 by Morgan McKeagney, “a phoenix from the flames of the dot bomb”, as Laurence Veale, a Senior Analyst in the company puts it. Laurence is effectively the face of iQ Content on (and often off) the web. Whether or not this is engineered, he’s the first person mentioned as a point of contact for the company when people mention them. He’s the most active on their blog and elsewhere on the web and offline.

Laurence calls iQ Content a “user experience company”, which I think describes them better than “web agency” or “web design company”—which is how I label most of the companies in this industry, Contrast included. But whatever you brand them, iQ Content have become the go-to company for large corporate or government sites in Ireland. The sixteen—soon to hit twenty—people in the firm are unlike the staff of any conventional web agency I’ve come across. Where usually I find uninterested, unenthusiastic and bored faces, in iQ Content you can see genuinely absorbed, energetic and impassioned people, almost right across the board. Colman Walsh, Brian Donohue, John Wood are some of these guys that I’ve had the pleasure of working with. Des Traynor is a newer addition, and in my opinion, one of the greatest assets to the company. Des understands the art and science of user experience and interaction so intuitively in a way I never will.

iQ Content will continue to thrive relatively uncontested in this country and they’re going to face even more pressure to grow for the next couple of years. This is a gift and a curse in my opinion, because such accelerated growth brings its problems too. Maybe I can help them here by making Contrast a worthy competitor!

Hero: xcommunications

xcommunications was founded in 1994 by Professor Marie Redmond. Marie hails from the academic world; she’s the Course Director of the MSc. in Multimedia Systems at Trinity College Dublin. As a Computer Science graduate of said college, I may be naturally inclined to look favourably on this company, but really, their hero status is earned by their Creative Director, Stewart Curry.

Stewart is another one of these understated, quietly confident individuals. He doesn’t blog about design and he’s rarely seen networking in the real world, but he is probably Ireland’s best web designer. I know Stewart since he started freelancing and have admired his work since then. Stewart left the freelance world—and the “feast or famine” lifestyle, as he once put it to me—and joined xcommunications in October 2006 and the company hasn’t been the same since. The quality of their work has been increasing exponentially ever since and I know that Stewart is directly or indirectly responsible for this; whatever they’re paying him, it can never be enough! Stewart says their twelve-man team is “split fairly evenly between programming, design and development, and project management / business development” and that they mostly focus “on large, content-managed web sites … with a side order of interactive / smaller projects”.

While their ASP.NET development approach is not my cup of tea, their ability to produce highly-polished sites for large clients—who in my experience are always more difficult to work with—has to be admired.

No backslapping allowed

These guys are my heroes, but that won’t last if this turns into a backslapping forum. Everyone mentioned above is banned from commenting; I will delete your post. Everyone else, feel free to let me know who your heroes are and why.