After wading through over 500 applications, meeting some great people, discovering some serious talent, and evaluating people on a variety of levels, we can finally announce our new designer. He’s Jamie Dihiansan.

Who’s Jamie?

First off, Jamie is a great guy. Kind, generous, curious, honest. We all get along well. He’s a good cultural fit. Without that nothing else matters. He’s also local which will be handy.

I’ve actually tried to hire Jamie a couple times before. Once about nine years ago when we first started 37signals (he didn’t want to leave the cushy confines of Big Agency life at Organic) and once a few years ago (we couldn’t afford him). This time the stars aligned.

For the past 7 years Jamie has been working at Crate & Barrel Online. First as a senior designer, later moving to the Senior Art Director role. He’s well steeped in designs that sell, clear communication, and understanding consumer behavior.

Why did we pick Jamie?

Part of the hiring process involved asking the leading candidates to redesign the Backpack home page in one week with no direction (we paid them for their time). We really liked Jamie’s take on it. It was the biggest departure from how we design our marketing sites today. It introduced some elements that we were hoping to see and surprised us with things we hadn’t thought of before. Down the road we plan on sharing all the designs submitted by the leading candidates.

We also picked Jamie because of his background, his artistic abilities (as much as I don’t like graffiti, I can see the art in Jamie’s work back in the day), and his approach to problem solving through design. He’s a clear thinker and an objective player. Good icon designer too. We liked all of those things.

We’re really excited

Jamie starts in September. We’re really excited to see his influence seep into our marketing sites and product UIs. The first major project will be reviewing our existing marketing/public sites and working on a universal redesign.

So, everyone say hi to Jamie Dihiansan!