Web_Designer_UK__May_2018

FORM AND FFUNCTION
Above Samuel Dupras (developer), Chloé-Ève Levasseur
(UX specialist) and Audrée Lapierre (creative director and
co-founder) discuss their latest project
forwardtousingD3Expressandseeifit
fulfilsitspromiseofamoreinteractiveand
creative way of designing (and coding)
data visualisation.”
Withaspecificapproachtoeach
project, how has FFunction approached
itsrecruitment?Audréeexplains:“Most
FFunction’s employees come from
multidisciplinarybackgrounds.Wehave
adeveloperwithabackgroundin
educationanddesign.Amarketing
director with an art history degree. An
artdirectorwithaMastersinengineering.
Ourprojectmanagerhasachemistry
degree(and,incidentally,isalsoa
certified yoga teacher).
“We look for smart people with a rich
knowledge base who can look at a
problem from several angles and find the
most creative, functional solution. We also
want to maintain our commitment to the
advancement of women from coding to
leadership, so we make sure the
composition of the team is at least 50 per
cent women. We also hire for team culture
fit; we want people who are interested in
staying current in terms of their outlook
andskillset.Andwewantpeoplethat
we’re happy to eat lunch with every day
too! It’s a small, close-knit team, and
there’s no room at FFunction for big
egos or jerks.
“In terms of design positions, we never
hire pure information designers. We hire
graphicdesignerswithapassionfor
information design. This is an important
distinction because employees need to
be able to work on a wide spectrum of
projects and we always need the ‘form’ as
well as the ‘function’. Honestly a lot of
people who specialise in information
design simply don’t have strong aesthetic
skills, or don’t understand typography.”
And Audrée advises: “My advice to
designers looking for work is this: design a
super tight CV, and publish new work
regularly. Create interesting side projects
that show off your skills and interest areas.”
The future will increasingly become
even more data driven. For FFunction this
means a landscape it can shape. “We’re
actually in a very exciting phase right
We also
want to
maintain our
commitment
to the
advancement
of women
from coding
to leadership,
so we make
sure the
composition
of the team is
at least 50
per cent
women
now,” Audrée concludes. “FFunction is
launching its first product; a project
planning tool called Min. We’re developing
this software because, honestly, we’ve
tried just about every project
management tool on the market, and
none of them were that great at servicing
the needs of an agency.
“Min will allow the user to quickly make
a project timeline and track budgets,
projects and resources. But I think the
clincher is this: Min auto-calculates the
best delivery dates based on your task
dependencies and current team
availability. I always wished that we had
that capability at our fingertips when
planning client projects, it would have
been so useful.
“The response so far to Min has been
extremely enthusiastic; we’ve signed up
more than 600 people for early access to
the beta without doing any advertising.
That tells us that other people are feeling
just as frustrated with the current tools on
the market as we are and there is demand
for this combination of features.
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