50 on Fire will bring together D.C.’s best and brightest to recognize the disruptors, luminaries and visionaries that are pushing our city forward. Buy your tickets now and join us on Dec. 10 at Howard Theatre for the celebration and winners reveal.
Innovation isn’t always pretty but making the future look good is just as much a part of creating tomorrow. Washington D.C. has many imaginative and hard-working designers, whether its workspaces, websites or the very way designers do things. Meet the finalists below and come see whose designs have set them on fire on Dec. 10.
BlueText – Bluetext is a brand and website designers with a long list of impressive clients locally and all over the world including tech and startup companies like Canvas, Google and Weatherbug. In addition to design, they also do communications work for clients.
Clare Marino, GTM Architects – Marino is a partner at GTM and has been behind the design of some of the most popular restaurants and retail spaces in the city including Cafe Deluxe, Carving Room and Lou’s City Bar.
Create.io – Create’s platform offer 3D maps of cities and buildings, integrating all kinds of data to offer far more immediate insight than standard blueprints. It shows context as well, indicating how different building projects might affect the area around it and the impact on value.
Illustria -Illustria offers a subscription for access to its designs. Its tiered design lets subscribers get different levels of service instead of forcing a one-size-fits-all model on everyone. The company has grown into a seven-figure revenue with hundreds of clients this year.
iStrategyLabs – iStrategyLabs has had a very busy year, signing on Volkswagen Group USA, its biggest contract yet, shortly before the scandal about Volkswagen’s emissions cheating broke. In addition to that scramble, ISL had a lot else going on, bringing on independent distillery William Grant & Sons, growing its team size and making about 75 percent of its business on retained income.
Kyle Conrad, nclud – Conrad is a senior interactive designer at nclud. He’s been behind plenty of nclud’s client projects, and has also worked to build things that will impress and lure in new ones. For example, as a fun side project, he built an entire interactive 3D map of the Star Wars galaxy from an open-source database.
Macaw – An impressively successful Kickstarter project that raised almost $300,000, Macaw basically acts an an image editor. But can translate what you do visually into HTML and CSS code in a way that is actually useful for web designers. That means you don’t need to be a code expert to build a good-looking and cleanly coded website.
MapBox – MapBox does map APIs, offering open-source mapping data directly to developers so that they can integrate their platforms with geographic data. The company has been doing very well this year, raising $52.6 million after a partnership with MapQuest and its software is in well over a million apps.
Modus Create – Modus Create is a product studio with a particular focus on technology. They work especially on training teams at other companies into how to become more productive and efficient when it comes to building prototypes and shipping products and dealing with back-end technology.
Wingate Hughes Architects – Wingate Hughes Architects has been on a roll since it started five years ago, and this year was no exception. The company’s work in the D.C. area in particular has been cited in a ton of media. The list of startup-related spaces it has worked on is huge and includes some of the companies listed above like iStrategyLabs and nclud. It’s also worked with 1776, Optoro, Everfi and Endgame. The company has won numerous awards including from American Society of Interior Designers , Architect Magazine and NAIOP.
