Pixel Pixel 6th birthday

Today Pixel Pixel turns six years old! It’s a bittersweet birthday for us – with colleagues, friends and clients confined to their homes during this difficult time, celebrations are understandably low-key and ‘socially distant’ this year.

With Happy Birthday reserved for the greater good of keeping the nation’s hands clean, we thought we’d use this time to tell you a story, instead…

It was 2014; Selfie sticks were all the rage, ‘Happy’ by Pharrell Williams was sung in earnest across the UK, and buoyed by the recent Winter Olympic successes, many in the country had taken to throwing themselves headfirst down steep hills.

Meanwhile – in a corner of Wiltshire more commonly known for crazy roundabouts and train building – a young (and luxuriously-haired) Jon athan Rawlins was finalising his plans to set up a new web agency.

Having left behind the safety and comfort (and regular pay-cheque) of established agency life a year before, Jonathan had been working as a freelance web developer. An experience which allowed Jonathan to build relationships with potential clients and establish where real improvements could be made to traditional methods of web project delivery.

Looking to disrupt the traditional agency model, Jonathan wanted to create a business where customers could get direct access to the people working on their projects, rather than get information second (or even third) hand through layers of account management.

For the first year of our existence, this ‘access to experts’ approach was greatly aided by Jonathan being the only employee! But, over this time he built lasting relationships, which are still integral to our work today. In 2015 the company started to grow, both by utilising the design services of David Wildish and contract developer James Zych.

In 2016 we hired our first full-time employee, web developer Ben Cleverly. Later the same year, Chris Snowden joined as a replacement for Ben, who had moved on to a new opportunity. Chris is now our lead front-end developer, and a face many of you may be familiar with from speaking to him over the past few years.

The past 18 months have been a particularly busy time for us, and one that has seen our team grow significantly. In the past year, David joined us as a full-time employee, allowing us to bring his unique designs to a wider range of projects.

Closely following David was Mike Earl, bringing further front-end developer skills to our development experts. Later in 2019, the team expanded once again with the additions of Lucy Hicks and Jon Evans (contract), who joined us to look after our project delivery and copywriting respectively. Early 2020, Marianne Rawlins joined Pixel Pixel to aid with running and maintaining the day to day finance of the company.

We have continued to be guided by our ‘access to experts’ ethos over the past six years – carefully adding to our pool of expertise as we continue to grow. Our team now consists of eight experts, spanning the full range of development, creative and strategic expertise.

Still led by (a now less luxuriously haired) Jonathan Rawlins; our expertise includes full-stack development, unique web and print design, strategic project management, and copywriting.

Over this time, we are immensely proud and grateful to have worked and continue to work alongside our clients at some of the critical points in their own development. We have taken immense pleasure in working with you to deliver projects as wide-ranging as a train seat booking system, a legal news site revamp, a legal firm revamp, a dental site revamp, a product management training site revamp and many other projects for brands both large and small.

And, as we embark on our sixth year in these difficult times, our team has continued to adapt to the quirks and challenges of fully-remote working with the same humour and energy that has seen us through the last six years.

We want to thank everyone who has been with us from the start, who uses, has used, recommended, or otherwise engaged with us and our services over the years. We hope that you are staying safe and healthy during this unusual time and we look forward to seeing you all again very soon!

By: Jonathan Evans