A lot can change in five, ten years.
2020: a new decade full of possibilities and a wiser, refreshed, now 5-year-old SeaLab ready to help create realities from those possibilities. SeaLab greets you today as a Digital Product Design Services Agency with both project-based and monthly design plans created and tailored for you and your project(s). But to say we called ourselves that (or even COULD call ourselves that) on day 01 would be a complete fabrication. From Itty Bitty Creative Studio to Digital Product Design Services Agency, this is the (now 5-year-old) SeaLab story.
2014 SeaLab:
We Make Applications & Websites Beautiful
When SeaLab was born in November 2014, our services goal was to help design, re-design and implement fully responsive websites and applications, as well as offer solutions on branding and style guide creation and implementation. With no decided industry "focus", we gained opportunities to work with projects of lots of different sizes, in many different industries. Through those projects, we gained experience creating and managing responsive design systems and built a solid knowledge base on best practices for screen sizes, different devices, and browsers, along with general user behavior online.
While SeaLab continues to be an industry-agnostic shop that enjoys working on the detailed high-fidelity design work, we found ourselves truly enjoying the chance to stretch our user experience wings with some of the bigger projects clients had for us. With every user experience (UX) project, we gained an opportunity to explore personas, use cases, user journeys, prototyping, proper usage practices, and best of all, user testing and iteration, all within unique timeline and budgetary constraints. We helped beautiful and usable websites and applications come to life from scratch and our clients consistently expressed their satisfaction with their customers' feedback and responses. Our work was not only pretty, but testing showed it was usable as well. We had gone from an aesthetic-focused design shop to an agency seeking to build products not only beautiful but also functional and helpful.
2016 SeaLab:
We Make Applications & Websites Beautiful & Usable
While SeaLab had gotten effective at collecting quotes, data, and results directly before, during, and after a project together, we were curious to know for sure if projects succeeded in the world long after SeaLab. So we made a few tweaks to our process and began offering quarterly check-ins, quality assurance services through tools and channels of our client's choice, implementation support and guidance, and began offering to create and manage living breathing design systems when applicable. SeaLab officially set our sights on long-term relationships with projects and clients.
By offering quality assurance services during and after implementation and timely check-ins down the line, we not only hoped to keep UX at the top of our clients' minds but also to perform our own UX assessments to see what we, as a creative team, can learn from each project. We keep our clients and their clients in a better place for as long as they'll have us!
2018 SeaLab:
We Make Applications & Websites Beautiful & Usable Forever
It became clear that projects usually could use some sort of design support and direction later down the line; whether the project was expanding and needing some inspiration for new screens, or our clients were hoping to get a new illustration for a success screen, or even just updating photos or designs based on design trends, a little design shop TLC and direction benefitted many products. With this discovery, we made our final pivot and opened up our services as a monthly offering to serve these clients' needs. We offer design hours in "buckets" to clients, and essentially function as their dedicated design shop for anything small or large, anything they might need! If we're on retainer with you, you're our first priority.
As our clients have learned, a long term relationship with a design shop means a long term creator, manager, and guardian over your design system built with consistency and long-term health in mind. It means consistency, keeping your user top of mind, and caring for the full experience of your product. We're problem solvers, and the more familiar we are with your design system, your business goals, your technology constraints, and general product, the better we can assist you towards your goals, and the faster we can churn out solutions.
2020 SeaLab and Onward:
We Make Products Beautiful & Usable Forever
Our passion is rooted in solving problems. Whether it's how to get started designing the general layout and flow for the greatest product in the world, or how to help reduce the barrier of entry to a signup form, we'd love to help with any digital product design challenge you have. We've got experience in the creation of user interfaces, adding aesthetic polish to existing products, custom illustration and animation, marketing, user testing, accessibility, and more. We've gained skills working with projects of all sizes and are confident we can help no matter what the constraints. We provide solutions for as long as you need us. From project beginning to end, and monthly check-ins from then on. We help your project succeed, and we've got the know-how and dedication to make it happen.
We're so confident in our latest pivot, we even revamped our website from scratch to better reflect our new direction. Stop by! Say hello! Sign up for our brand new newsletter to keep up with our goings-on, or just shoot us a note and we'll grab a coffee. We'd love to hear from you.
Cheers to the next 10 years. See how we've grown through our work, or learn how Cal the squid grew right alongside us.
