The Big Noob

In the beginning, there was Neubix...

Neubix & The Big Noob, CliffsNotes Style

In March of 2000 a guy by the name of Brad Smith received a resume from an Office Depot employee named Ryan Sims. Being hungry, they went to get some lunch. After an hour of conversation, they decided to start working together.

Six months later they were both informed their jobs were going away, so they did what any group of young adults would do... Brad took a second mortgage out on his house, while Ryan started working up some logo comps, website wire frames and a mission statement (kidding about a mission statement). Two weeks later, they had a new office, 5 employees, credit card debt and ZERO clients. Yet they sucked it up, threw their bodies upon the burning altar of client work and pushed through.

Fast forwarding 3 years, we find our heroes neck deep in the poo of that same client work. They needed a vent. A release, if you will. A company blog. But not just any company blog. A company blog that took the idea of what a company blog should be and threw it out the effing window. In March of 2005, as they were attending SXSW in Austin, TX, Brad, Ryan and their new recruit Keegan launched The Big Noob. The Noob got big. It got big quick.

Two months after its launch, Ryan and Brad were asked to move their company to Boston to join another really amazing group of people.

They did.

Brad and Ryan were now separated from Keegan. Life was busy with relocating homes, moving companies and new adventures. The Big Noob began to suffer. And in early 2006, The Noob went into a forced hibernation.

Since that time, Brad, Ryan and Keegan haven't been the same. They needed the Noob and the Noob needed them. They talked about taking some time to redesign and resurrect it...

They did.

Welcome to Season Two. We missed all of you - so much!

How'd you make this site?

On a Mac. Now, this is important for a plethora of reasons. Here are a few: (1) OS X makes using our computers a joy and not a chore. Although it's something we take for granted pretty regularly, it should not be overlooked. (2) The design tools and applications available for the Mac are um, well, amazing. More on that in a moment. (3) It's a hell of a lot of fun to throw Pirates of the Silicon Valley parties, wearing black turtlenecks and playing the Boom game. Not that we do this regularly. That would be weird. (4) The only reason we'd use a PC — besides browser testing — is because John Hodgman is a funny funny man. (5) The six-figure endorsement deal.*

*Not true.

Good software gets us all giddy. The Big Noob, just like any other project we do, always starts in Adobe Photoshop. After slaving over nearly every pixel there, the next step includes TextMate, a wonderful little app that lets us code all the CSS, XHTML and sometimes PHP by hand. Panic's Transmit miraculously moves these files from our Macs to our Linux servers. Like David Blaine magic. Some days, we'll write blog posts in TextEdit before publishing them in the CMS. Brad goes so far as to claim that TextEdit is the perfect application.

The fonts used are Century Schoolbook for the logo, post titles and popular post titles, Georgia for the capitalized subheadings and most italics and Lucida Grande (Verdana on a PC) for pretty much everything else. All handwritten fonts are drawn by Ryan's Mighty Mouse.

Pretty much every bit of content on this site is managed by Symphony. It's highly customizable, extremely well-designed and a dream to use. Highly recommended. We use Media Temple for hosting, get our stat fix with Shaun Inman's loverly Mint and . We use Patience when using Internet Explorer, even though it is not deserved.