Welcome to the Foundry.
We're a small group of developers, interface designers, and engineers
that craft exceptional user experiences. We work on projects of our own
and help clients large and small create software that their customers love.
We begin every project with the same goal: to meet user needs and make the boundaries of technology
disappear. We're incurable builders and perpetual brainstormers with
a passion for software.
We build great apps.
Recently, we've spent the majority of our time building mobile apps. No, not fart apps and soundboards.
Real, beautiful, applications that deliver engaging experiences to people on-the-go. We've developed
several of our own apps, and we've worked with clients across the US and Canada to imagine, prototype
and develop their ideas. Our apps have been featured on the App Store, pictured in iPhone commercials—
even used to market HTC phones.
We also license source code from our apps to others looking to create rich, engaging experiences. Reusing
our painting engine allowed FingarTips to build
ARStreets at a lower cost. It allowed
MEDLMobile to build a polished
doodle messaging app in a month and a half. We've done the heavy lifting.
Contact us to see if licensing is the right way to jump-start your app.
Good design practice, practiced.
Sometimes, brilliant, usable software falls from the sky. For the other 99.9% of the time,
there's design. We believe that products should be designed from the ground up to
address what people need. We involve end users in every part of the design process,
from concept development to product refinement. At the end of the day, it's
not about what is technically impressive or easiest to build. It's about creating
things that people will love, adopt as their own, and carry into the world in their pockets.
Refinement
The final product is tested with clients and potential users. We tweak the interface, fix bugs, and prepare the
application for deployment.
Development
Once the prototype gets through user testing unscathed, development begins. Generally, one or two
of us work on each project.
Concept Development
We identify potential users, explain the concept to them and iterate on the idea. We use
this early feedback to assess viability and identify hurdles.
Prototyping
The napkin sketch becomes a storyboard, and the storyboard becomes a set of
wireframes. We use Fireworks to create a final set of interfaces for development.
User Testing
We lay the wireframes out in front of potential users and ask them to perform common tasks while thinking aloud.
We watch their actions and make sure our model of the app matches their intuition.
The apps.
Since a lot of our design and development is for our clients, we've only listed the apps we've built internally.
Ben has been doing iOS development for more than 3 years, and many of his apps are now maintained under Foundry 376.
Click through to each app's website for more information.
Launch your idea.
It's not rocket science, it's
just user centered design
and solid engineering by
hard-working people.
The team.
In 2008, Ben began writing his first iPhone app. Three years later, with a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction
under his belt and nine mobile apps in his porfolio, he defied all conventional logic to set up shop in the
heart of his favorite city: Nashville, TN. He gathered his fellow engineers and designers, and Foundry 376 was born.
Ben Gotow
Designer, Developer, Founder
I was raised in a homeschooling environment that taught me to love learning—
not as a means to an end, but as a lifelong process of exploration. I started
programming when I was 7, designed and implemented my first website when I was 9,
and received my first cease-and-desist order shortly thereafter. (Did you know that Orange
is a registered trademark in Canada?) The medium has changed over the years, but I have always been an incurable builder.
I moved to Nashville in 2006 to attend Vanderbilt. As an undergrad,
I worked as the multimedia editor and web architect of the school paper and it slowly changed the way I thought about software.
In journalism, emphasis is always on the readers. The people. The users.
I graduated in 2010 and went to Carnegie Mellon to pursue a masters in Human-Computer Interaction. I had the technical expertise to build
great software. The trick, I realized, was knowing what to build in the first place. My work at CMU taught me how to
conduct user research and design experiences from data. Now it's time to build. From napkin-sketch to 100,000 downloads on the App Store, we've got you covered.
Grayson Sharpe
Front-end Mobile
I graduated from Vanderbilt in 2010 and took a job at Goba.mobi, leading the development of their app for iOS and Android. In my free time, I
work on projects at the Foundry.
Demetri Miller
Networking Guru
I studied computer science at Vandy and spent a summer at Apple working on CFNetwork. I'm working on my masters in CS at Vandy and writing a
networking framework for a few new games we're developing.
