People over process. Truth over ego and perception.

We are people (and one house panther) dedicated to delivering on the lofty promises of Design. We are designers. We are managers. We are artists. We are humans. Our promise to you is we will always tell you the truth, even when it might not be what you want to hear. We'll support you and your teams to help you achive your goals and try to live up to the world-changing promises our insustry has made on behalf of our profession. We know design is more than just pretty pictures and that designers are more than just people with "good taste."

Tony Santos

portrait of Tony Santos

Tony has been working as a designer since 1999 when he started his first web design company, Flying Monkey Web Design, with a few friends and started being the local "neighbor kids who could build your business a website." Since then he's: dropped out of a Computer Science degree program, graduated with a BFA in Advertising & Graphic Design from the Columbus College of Art & Design, a MS in Human Centerd Design and Engineering from the University of Washington, been a design lead at T-Mobile and Microsoft, run design teams at Mozilla and Apple, and worked at a bunch of startups and scaleups, and taught design at San Fransico State University.

Tony is a Design Engineer, which is a very fancy way of saying he's a designer who can code and specializes in helping design and engineering teams find common ground, helping designers gain a better understanding of the technology they're designing with, and engineers gain a beter understanding of how design works and applies to and impacts their jobs.

Pancake

portait of Pancake, a black cat sleeping in a cardboard box

Pancake is the Chief Nap Officer of Not Just Pretty Pictures. While she has no formal design training, she has very strong opinions about pretty much everything. She is often found helping out in meetings by walking in front of the camera to make sure the auto-focus still works, rearranging Tony's desk when he's put too many things near her napping box, and modeling good boundaries and self care by reminding us to take breaks so we have the energy to zoom up and down the stairs at least twice a day.