Gesture Theory

Gesture Theory is an industry-leading, full-service design and development firm headquartered in New York, NY.

We have extensive experience building products, consumer websites, iOS applications and other interactive tools and interfaces. As a team of multi-disciplinary experts, Gesture Theory emphasizes smart, elegant and lightweight user interactions through fundamental principles of User Experience (UX), Visual Design and Development Strategy. Our philosophy is loosely based around an Agile software development process, which enables our different teams to work efficiently and in parallel, while also ensuring our products meet and exceed the needs of our clients.

People
Philosophy
Design Process
Tech Capabilities
Clients

I try to stay curious & updated, after all we're not a bunch of bots but people interested in what's going on.

Michael Surtees is a multidisciplinary designer, writer and educator. He is a principal and Creative Director of Gesture Theory. Past clients he has worked with include Panasonic, Cablevision, Nooka, Daylife, NPR, Sungard and Telus among others. He has been published in New York Magazine, Core77, Slate, the AP, Aol's Switched and Mobile Behavior. As creator and author of Design Notes he tries to explore people's daily experiences and observations with design.

I am obsessed with learning how things work, whether it be coding, construction, or cooking.

Roy Yang is an entrepreneur at heart. From humble beginnings at a financial analysis firm where he used his programming skills to streamline processes, he went on to develop condos, restaurants, and settled on developing websites. He is a principal and Lead Developer of Gesture Theory. Past clients he has worked with include BigSoccer, Daylife, Trust Metrics, and Roll & Hill.
+ Design smart, elegant lightweight products
+ Create systems that can evolve & scale in an organic way
+ Inspire people to enjoy & share their experience
While each project is unique and offers different opportunities, we like to structure the work into a number of phases that feed into each other.

PHASE 1: Scope Phase

This allows us to gather all the information before we start the design and technical deep dive.

PHASE 2: Project Plan

This allows us to create an action plan based on the information gathered. Typically this will cover UX, Visual Design, Strategy & Technology.

PHASE 3: Design Phase

This is where things get awesome. By taking the time to understand the issues and opportunities, the design process takes off. Parallel UX and Visual Design tracks inform the design. This is tied into exploration, testing, prototyping and other elements appropriate.

PHASE 4: Build Phase

This is where the design comes to life. We feature an agile development process where we can build and iterate on the fly based on how our clients and their users interact with the product.

PHASE 5: Integration & Support

Creating an ongoing system that allows for feedback and the ability to improve consistently.
Gesture Theory prides itself on being a turn-key development shop. With our expert knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JS, we are able to build and iterate on all front-end web projects. We have experience interfacing with public and private APIs and have the capability to integrate fully with our clients' existing teams and backend resources. We can also work independently and deliver final designs composed of a cleanly built, well-documented code base.

CMS and Blogs

Gesture Theory has worked with Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and other open source blogging and CMS platforms. We've built Wordpress plugins and skinned and themed dozens of websites for our clients.

iOS

Gesture Theory has designed small and large scale iPad and iPhone applications. Understanding the fluid and organic ways users interact with their device is what makes every app we design a success.

Start Ups

When a client needs to build a proof of concept or an alpha release, they come to Gesture Theory. We feature an agile development process that allows our design team and development team to work in parallel as soon as the first wireframe is approved by the client. We've worked in various templating systems and frameworks, including Scala's PLAY! framework, Ruby on Rail's ERB, Python's JINJA, and PHP's Smarty templating sytems.

Web Applications

Sometimes internal tools and applications take a backseat to customer facing features. Utilizing our clients' existing public and private APIs, Gesture Theory has successfully complimented our clients' internal engineering team to build fast, effective web applications.
These are some of the great companies we've had the opportunity to work with. Case studies available upon request.