Grow People and Culture

People

Grow people have decades of design, technology and hosting expertise to share with you. Talk to us for free, unbiased friendly advice.

AMOS

AMOS is our mascot and short for ‘Accessibly Minded Online Software’: A set of principles and ethics we try and work to. When he isn’t powering a website he mostly likes to wonder the green hills of home looking for his favourite food, raspberries. See AMOS applications for more.

Jon Tan

Jon is a designer and the creative lead for the collective. He has a passion for user centred design with a special interest in accessibility and information architecture. He started design with Lego and was side-tracked for a while as a marketing director.

His work has featured on design gallerys including the CSS Zen Garden, CSS Remix, CSS Mania, CSS Beauty and Stylegala. Three of his sites were nominated in three different categories in the CSS World Awards 2006 with two featuring as finalists. Most recently, his work also featured in the new book The Principles Of Beautiful Web Design published by Sitepoint. When not working, he can mostly be found wrestling with his two young sons, and losing.

• Contact Jon Tan
• Articles
• JonTangerine.com

Jon Gibbins

Jon is an interface and application developer. He is an administrator for the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS), taking part in discussion of the latest Web accessibility issues and solutions, as well as an active member and moderator of the Accessify Forum community, helping other people to better their skills as accessible Web designers.

In a previous life, he remembers receiving a Masters Degree in Electronic Engineering with Music Technology Systems, playing guitar in various bands and persuing other musical endeavours.

• Contact Jon Gibbins
• Dotjay.co.uk

Alan Colville

Alan is an experience designer and usability consultant; an expert in end-to-end user experience for products and sites. He was formerly the head of customer experience for BT Vision and a senior commercial manager for digital TV at Telewest Broadband (now part of Virgin Media) where he designed the video on demand and personal recorder services used by millions of people.

He is a passionate advocate of user centred design and now uses his vast experience in commercial and product management to create rewarding products for users and the companies offering them. When he’s not doing that, you might catch a glimpse of him running up mountains or biking down them, not necessarily sequentially.

• Contact Alan Colville

Charlie Markwick

Charlie, Network Engineer and all round techie guru is the technical authority for Grow. A veteran software programmer, Charlie’s roots lie in a long-lost time before there was anything called ‘the Internet’.

He now spends his time configuring networks and delivering hosting and software for clients like the government. Occassionally he does extraordinary things like connect canal boats to a virtual private network using GPRS and read stories to children dressed as a pirate.

• Contact Charlie

Paul Whitrow

Paul is a Web Developer. He's a product of 4 years at Hewlett Packard as a web application developer, notably developing critical software for the production line. A qualified electronic engineer, he enjoys playing with Javascript & PHP and building web applications that makes complicated tasks simple. When he's not doing amazing things with code he divides his time between comics and Bushido in no particular order.

• Contact Paul
• Articles

Culture

Grow Collective is a co–operative consortium which was founded to deliver design and hosting with old fashioned personal service and value for money.

That Means?

It means we are interested in developing relationships with clients that allow us to become a trusted advisor and partner.

It means we guarantee personal service and we will go the extra mile to come in on time and on budget.

Finally, it means we will give qualified, honest advice every time… and if we aren't the best partner for you, we will tell you.

Let us help you develop your ideas to their full potential — you won’t be disappointed.

More about co–operative principles we subscribe to from the International Co-operative Alliance.

Working with both Jon Tan and Jon Gibbins was a joy; not only do they possess the skills necessary to shape ideas and bring them to life, but their rich personalities and keen sense of humor makes the entire process a lot of fun.

Chris Shiflett, web architect, security analyst and principal of OmniTI. Case study →

About Grow Version 3

Version 3 is entitled, ‘Omnigraph’: An instrument for copying something to a desired scale. The design is influenced by the moderated tension that comes from working within design contraints yet scaling from paper to web, from monitor to mobile. To express it we've used classic typography and muted contrast colours spiced with modern shapes and forms.

The composition is deliberately clean, spacious and discrete. We imagined the presentation to be a gallery space for our design work and our applications used to power the site like GrowBlog.

The logo and the headers are set in the immortal Georgia by Matthew Carter of Carter and Cone who also designed Tahoma which is was used for paragraph text. All of these fonts were orginally created for the Typography Group at Microsoft and were made freely available to all on August 12, 2002. Matthew Carter also designed Verdana (now used for paragraph text).

There’s more about Grow version 3 in the article.