69. TANAGRAM PARTNERS
“The shoeless shoemaker’s children have nothing on the web design firm without a website,” says Tanagram’s creative director Lance Rutter. But that was the situation after Tanagram merged with another company with a heavy bench of usability and architecture experts.

“It’s tough to convince organizations and businesses that you’ve got your act together when they find an ‘under construction’ page at your URL,” says Rutter. “But it’s even tougher to get a roomful of web designers to agree on what the site should look like, how it should function, and how risky or conservative it should be.” In fact, says Rutter, only partly tongue-in-cheek, the team almost came to blows over the question of whether to use Flash. After some 50 iterations, Tanagram’s site complies with W3C standards for accessibility—and eschews Flash. More important, the site showcases Tanagram’s expertise in branding and identity, information engineering, and usability optimization, showing clients just what “information artists” can achieve. Ken Coupland