A Fond Farewell to Laura after 11 years

Having played a key role in so many of the projects we've completed over the years, it's with a heavy heart we share the news that Laura is leaving us pursue new challenges with a London-based agency. Her valuable support will be much missed by us all and I'd like to personally thank her for the huge contribution she's made to all of our projects and clients, and we all wish her luck in her exciting new chapter.

As we gave Laura a special presentation this morning, we looked back on the changes we've seen over the last 11 years. And there have been A LOT of changes.

Laura joined A Digital (or Armitage Online as we were back then) while we had a shoebox of an office. There was just the 2 of us crammed into what was once an old garage. Laura would design and I would code, although latterly I've spent more time breaking things than coding them.

Back then websites seemed so much easier to build. 'Web design' was pretty much HTML code, CSS styling rules and a sprinkling of javascript to add some fancy dropdown menus, although more often than not we were using it to kludge a bug in Internet Explorer 6!

I'm not even sure back then we were working with version control. What craziness!

There was no mobile web as we now know it. We were asking ourselves whether to build a dedicated mobile site (probably using jQuery mobile) or try this new fangled approach called responsive design which has since become the de facto approach for modern websites.

I'm not even sure back then we were working with version control. What craziness! We went through Subversion before switching over to Git which was very much the direction of travel and much easier to work with.

There were lots of opportunities to back the wrong technology along the way - although I'm not sure that's really changed.

CSS was simply a set of style rules that were written, saved and uploaded. There were none of these fancy pre-processors that compile and minify your code. We've been through LESS, SASS, SCSS, eventually settling on writing utility-first CSS with Tachyons and compiling files with Gulp. More recently we've embraced Tailwind.css which gives us the benefit of performance and efficiency when building out page layouts with our CMS of choice, Craft CMS.

Over the years we've been to conferences and meetups in the UK and even shared a few trips to Europe for the Inspire and GeeUp conferences in Leiden and Dot All in Berlin.

I'm also delighted to say that Laura won't be leaving the Craft CMS community and I'm sure our paths will cross again at an event soon.

11 years is a long time and a lot changes personally as well as professionally. I'm hugely grateful for Laura's contributions and commitment over the years and while I'm disappointed we won't be working together, I'm excited for the new challenges that we'll both face over the coming months.

Thank you to Andrew and the rest of the team. I’ve made lasting friendships here and I can’t pretend that I won’t miss working with you all everyday. I’ve had the pleasure of working with lovely clients over the last 11 years too. I wish everyone all the best.

Laura

Laura's departure obviously leaves a gap on our team and we're very excited to introduce our new design and UX lead in our next post. For now though, we all wish Laura the very best of luck in her new role.

We'll also miss Jasper 🐕 who wasn't quite as productive, but none the less was just as much a part of the team!