Announcing Design Inc.
Hello friends and followers, we’re thrilled to officially announce Design Inc.
At Design Inc., we are on a mission to help bring great design to the world and help as many designers, illustrators, writers, photographers, videographers in the world as possible find sustainable work. We have been called by some the Angies List & Thumbtack for creative services. We want to elevate the role of the worker in the rising trend of the gig economy.
Since launching our platform in December 2016 we’ve seen over $1.1M worth of projects come through our platform across almost 300 submissions projects.
So, what exactly is Design Inc. ?
Design Inc. is a marketplace where people and companies can obtain high quality creative work, on demand, from our hand-curated design and creative talent community. With Design Inc. we pair you with incredible designers who have helped the world’s most successful companies — these are not amateurs just getting their feet wet — these are hand-picked pros who are vetted based on their years of real world experience.
How Design Inc. works:
- Companies or individuals post their project for free.
- Our hand-picked talent pool sees these project requests through our app, via email and our highly active Slack community.
- If a creative wants to engage with a project, then they select the quote and create a proposal through our app. The creatives pay between $5 and $36 to send a proposal. Once a project receives 5 proposals it’s locked. (asking users to pay to send a proposal allows them to self select and turns out to be a wonderful way to ensure quality matching between creatives and requestors).
- The requestor then reviews the proposals, portfolios and is able to chat with the designers and finally hires the person they believe is the best fit for their project.
- Thats it! The transaction details (payment, contract etc.) are left up to the company and talent to address.
Why do I need Design Inc.?
The hand-curated group of creative folks on Design Inc. are quite diverse — we have all types of digital and graphic designers, but we also have writers, photographers and videographers — Here’s a non-exhaustive list of situations where you might want to use Design Inc.
- Designing a mobile app from the ground up (UX and UI).
- Brand, logo and website for my business.
- Interaction, animation and motion design.
- Prototyping and front-end engineering.
- I need help writing and editing an article.
- Presentation and pitch deck design to crush my meeting or fundraising.
- Custom illustrations and icons for marketing and communication design.
- Designer to augment my current team.
- Explainer videos and marketing videos
- Photographer to shoot pics of my team or product.
- Convert my wire-frames to beautiful visual design.
- Awesome chalk typography or paint a killer mural in my office space.
- Stickers, posters and t-shirts for my company.
- Hundreds of photos that need to be retouched.
- My app or website totally redesigned from the ground up.
- VR app design
- Design leader to help design thrive at our company.
- Industrial designer to take my idea and make it a reality
Our founding team consists of tech and design veterans. Marc Hemeon, CEO and co-founder, has spanned well known startups and public companies including YouTube, Google, Oakley, Digg and TeeFury. Prior to Design Inc., Marc co-founded incubator North Technologies with Kevin Rose, which merged with popular watch site Hodinkee.com. Up next, our CTO and co-founder, Bjoern Zinssmeister who has spent more than a decade as a software engineer. Bjoern is best known for his work in building community platforms like Match and Synack. Rounding out the team is, Joel Beukleman, head of design, best known for his mobile design work with Netflix and Android Auto at Google. Wait there’s more, check out the rest of our team here.
We’re also very excited to announce that Design Inc. has raised $2.3 million in funding led by Harrison Metal with additional investment from OATV (O’reily AlphaTech Ventures), Collaborative Fund, Okapi Venture Capital, Box Group, 500 Startups and various angels.
Press Kit
Download our logo, photos, pics of our office etc. here you can also learn the story behind our logo.
Come Say Hi!
Our headquarters is in Southern California in the heart of Costa Mesa. We neighbor the beach, embrace all things SoCal and would love to see you if you are in the area.
Design Inc. HQ
765 Baker St. Studio F, Studio H, Costa Mesa, CA 92677.
Where else can we find Design Inc.?
- designinc.com
- instagram.com/designinchq
- facebook.com/designinchq
- twitter.com/designinc
- youtube.com/designinc
- Design Inc. UNDO Show and podcast (iTunes), catch the live streamevery Friday at Noon PST. We do one show a week.
- Blogging at journal.designinc.com
Meet the Team
Marc Hemeon
Founder & CEO
Twitter / LinkedIn / Medium
Marc is the Founder and CEO of Design Inc. His career in design began more than 20 years ago and has spanned well known startups and public companies including YouTube, Google, Oakley, Digg and TeeFury. Prior to Design Inc. Marc co-founded incubator North Technologies with Kevin Rose, which merged with popular watch site Hodinkee.com
Prior to North, Marc co-founded fflick.com, which was acquired by YouTube. While at YouTube, he held roles including leading design on the YouTube Player, YouTube Live, YouTube TV, the first broad redesign of YouTube in 2012 and then again in 2013. While at Google, Marc continued to his product designer role and contributed to Google Analytics, various Google Ads products and to the Google Self driving car project.
Previously, Marc was the Director of UX for Luxottica owned, Oakley. He and his team designed and created the e-commerce platforms and digital marketing for variety of Luxottica brands including Oakley, Ray-Ban, Arnette and Revo. Prior to Oakley, Marc worked as the lead product designer at Digg and co-founded TeeFury and DesignByHumans, two popular crowd sourced t-shirt sites.
In addition, Marc is an active speaker, writer and advisor to multiple startups and companies. He enjoys surfing, sushi, painting and his family.
Marc graduated from Brigham Young University with a BS degree in Business Information Systems
Bjoern Zinssmeister
Co-Founder & CTO
Twitter / LinkedIn
Bjoern is the Co-Founder and CTO of Design Inc. He is best known for his work with building community platforms like Match and Synack.
Bjoern has spent more than a decade as a software engineer and built two venture backed startups from the ground up. Prior to Design Inc. Bjoern worked as a mobile lead for Match Group (Match, Tinder, OKCupid) and was instrumental in helping Match establish their labs office in San Francisco prior to their IPO and acquisition of OK Cupid. Bjoern went on to lead engineering at YCombinator backed Userfox, which was later acquired by Adroll.
In September of 2013 Bjoern joined Synack as their Director of Engineering and helped to build up their engineering team from the ground up, helping the company to grow and raise successful A and B rounds.
Originally from Germany, Bjoern graduated from the Trier University of Applied Sciences with a degree in Computer Science before moving out to San Francisco to pursue his work with startups.
Joel Beukelman
Head of Design
Twitter / Linkedin
Joel is the Director of Design at Design Inc. He spent his career focused on product design. Joel is best known for his mobile design work with Netflix and Android Auto at Google.
Before joining Design Inc., Joel worked as an interaction designer for Google on the Android Auto team developing new ways to safely interact with technology in a car. Prior to that, Joel helped design and launch original content experience at Netflix, including notable shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black. Joel’s decade long history in design is underscored by his early work as a photographer and graphic designer.
Joel received a BA Graphic Design from Cal State San Bernardino
Matthias is the Lead Engineer at Design Inc. Prior to joining Design Inc., he worked at Synack, where he designed and built systems for crowd sourced penetration testing and lead re-architecture efforts with Docker. Previously, his work at Deutsche Telekom AG focused on algorithms to predict user behavior patterns and research around Connected Cars, Smart Home Systems and IoT. He also contributed to the MotionBank project to help invent a digital language to visualize dance patterns
Matthias founded the Frankfurt Docker Meetup and is originally from Germany. He holds a Master’s Degree in Leadership in the Creative Industries from Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences (HDA) & Cork Institute of Technology (CIT) as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Digital Media from HDA & CIT.
Mikey Wills is a software engineer at Design Inc. and leads our front-end development efforts. Prior to Design Inc. Mikey worked as a hybrid product designer and developer for a variety of startups including co-founding InVibe, a healthcare research startup, and well known Shopify theme leader, StyleHatch. Mikey was also an apparel designer, launching his own private label design firm working with brands such as Billabong, Urban Outfitters, and Forever 21.
Mikey holds a Bachelors in Business Administration from Vanguard University.
