Boston, MA E-mail: info@hotknifedesign.com Phone: (617) 401-7546

Hot Knife Design, Inc., is a Boston-area Web design contracting and consulting firm with years of experience developing Web sites and applications.

We create Web sites, user interfaces, and Web 2.0 community portals and content management systems. We believe that successful Web sites and applications must balance user satisfaction, technical feasibility, and business viability. Our design process respects both the needs of the people using the digital product and the objectives of the organization producing it.

Hot Knife Design maintains ongoing strategic partnerships with a community of design, development, and usability consultants and contractors, assembling flexible and agile teams of experts on a project-by-project basis to suit the needs of its clients.

Our work has received a number of industry awards including the American Graphic Design Award, the Apex Award, and the Neenah Paper Silver Medal.

"Jon brings his passion about user experience to the column he writes for UXmatters—"Beautiful Information". He's an excellent writer, so makes my job as his editor easy. I really appreciate his great work ethic. It's a pleasure to work with him."

— Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Publisher, Editor in Chief, & Director of User Experience Design, UXmatters

President

At Hot Knife, Jon is responsible for visual design and project management.

He has ten years of experience creating compelling user experiences for Web sites and Web applications. Jon’s visual design work has garnered several American Graphic Design Awards, the Apex Award, and other industry recognition. Jon’s first design job was for Saul Bellow’s literary magazine, News from the Republic of Letters, and he has a passion for typography, its history, and its proper use in design.

Jon is an internationally published author on the topics of user experience and information design. He contributes regularly to Web industry publications UXmatters, Digital Web and A List Apart. His articles have been translated into Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Jon is active in professional associations including the Boston Web Innovators Group, the Interaction Design Association (IxDA), the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) Boston Chapter, and the User Experience Network (UXnet). He is a past member of the AIGA, the professional association for design.

Selected Clients, Contracts, and Employers:
DF King, New York Public Library, Scenic Hudson, Glance Networks, Concert Pharmaceuticals, State of Massachusetts Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission

Consulting Creative Director

Matthew Holm is an accomplished writer, artist, and Web developer.

For eight years, he was an editor at the Hearst Corporation's 1.6 million-circulation Country Living Magazine, where he wrote about topics ranging from home-building, architecture, and historic preservation to food, travel, and current events. His freelance work has included a great deal of science writing, making the research of Ph.D.'s accessible to a lay audience.

At Hot Knife, Matt is a designer and developer with experience in CSS, JavaScript/JQuery, Bootstrap, and ExpressionEngine. Matt acts as a copy writer and an information architect as needed, using his writing and editing skills to organize the structure and content of clients' Web sites in the most clear, logical, and approachable manner possible, and employing his considerable talents as an illustrator to craft wireframes and paper prototypes to aid in the design, testing, and building of Web sites.

Matt has held the positions of Vice Chair and Secretary of the Computer-Human Interaction Forum of Oregon (CHIFOO, the Oregon chapter of the Association of Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction), and is currently the organization's webmaster.

In addition to his work in the on-line world, Matt is also a professional children’s book illustrator, and is active in the children’s literature and reading education communities. More than 2 million copies of his Eisner-award-winning Babymouse graphic novels (published by Random House) are currently in print, in addition to his bestselling Squish series.

Selected Clients, Contracts, and Employers:
Outcome Referrals, Urban Wallace Associates, Pacific Crest Community School, New York Public Library, Scenic Hudson, AnswerThink