Faculty

Though small and relatively new, this studio in Boulder, Colorado already has some big-name clients

While you may not have heard of Faculty, you may well be familiar with its founder Chris Shiflett. An author and leader in web design and development over the last two decades, he’s perhaps best known for co-founding and hosting Brooklyn Beta, as well as his talks at the likes of Webstock, OSCON and South by Southwest.

In November 2016, Shiflett got together with other experienced designers and developers and founded a small studio in Boulder, Colorado called Faculty. Since then they’ve been quietly getting on with creating great work for some impressive clients.

We caught up with Shiflett – along with web developer Sean Coates, project manager Chris Merritt and writer Sara Distin – to chat about Faculty’s offbeat setup, their passion for web standards and why IRC trumps Slack.

How did Faculty come about?

CS: I started Faculty for a pretty simple reason: to design, engineer and build great websites. That’s especially important now that the web has become slow, brittle and broken. As we increasingly rely on the web, it has become increasingly unreliable.

We all deserve better. I’ve been around long enough to remember when the web was better: exciting and inspiring, with the potential to communicate ideas, spread knowledge, bring us together and unlock our collective talents. So I feel a responsibility to build sites that work and are trustworthy, accessible, scalable and reliable.

Your workforce is part-remote and you run a couple of co-working studios. What are the pros and cons of this approach?

SD: We have the same benefits that other remote or distributed teams enjoy: we can hire and work with the best people; it’s not a big deal if anyone needs to work from home; people can choose to work where they’re most comfortable and productive.