Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Amber Sawaya. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Amber, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear your thoughts about making remote work effective.
Remote work has been our first choice since we opened our business in 2006. At that time, very much like today, most of our clients were outside of the Mountain West, so it didn’t make sense for us to have an office for a long time. After several years of working from home, I started going to local coworking spaces like Work Hive (https://workhiveslc.com). I was ready to get out of the house!
In early 2020 we decided to expand to a larger office in CommonGrounds (https://cgworkplace.com/) and work mostly in the office. It was a funny time to make that choice since we all went into pandemic lockdown shortly thereafter. Once it was safe to return to the office, we picked up a weird little designer-type spot in the old Zim’s Crafts Building on State Street in the theater district of downtown Salt Lake City. It had all the hallmarks of a design firm’s office: exposed brick, loud HVAC, and a bunch of historical flooring from its time as a stagecoach wheel factory during the late 1800s. It smelled like art and history. Things designers go crazy for, even if they get splinters from the floors and have to sit at a cockeyed angle at 3 pm because the sun coming in those single-pane glass windows from the early 1900s is baking the room.
After a year, our crew voted to let the office go and return to working from home. They cited reasons like being closer to their kids’ schools, being able to throw a load of laundry in the wash between meetings, and being home with pets and partners. We had so much fun in the office together that we wanted to keep that culture going.
For us, that has meant a few interesting ideas. We require all employees to be in Utah and be available to meet in person a few times a year. We span from Draper to Logan, with the largest cluster in Salt Lake City. We get together twice a year for summits, a Winter Summit to review how the business did the last year and to prep goals for next year, and a Summer Summit where we look internally at the team and award our Excellence Award to one employee that has made an outstanding impact on our agency. The Winter Summit is somewhere cozy, like Publik Coffee’s rental room, and the Summer Summit is a chance for us to get together in nature. We meet at a campground in the mountains and review our surveys, give out our Excellence Award and any bounties people have collected, and have lunch together. Bounties are a $20 cash pop quiz on our Monday Meeting, and if you get it right, I put the money in an envelope for the next time I see the group.
This year we had a couple of additional get-togethers. One was a baby shower for our first Anchor & Alpine baby. As we drove to Logan to meet the mama-to-be, our two crew members that relocated to Utah, one from Boston and one from Texas, went wide-eyed as we passed Lagoon Amusement Park. We bought tickets as soon as we were back, and this summer, we took a day off work and took the crew to Lagoon to hang out and play together.
Since we opted not to have an office, we wanted to put that money back into the crew. We issued everyone credit cards and encouraged them to go out, meet for coffee, and get together. When we went to Lagoon for the day, we reminded everyone to bring their cards for lunch and snacks. Whenever we get together, someone gets to be the high roller because the cards all get paid off from the same place; it’s better for us and the places we visit to do it under one check.
We only schedule two meetings per week, one on Monday to get us on the same wavelength and focused for the week and the other on Thursday for creative critique. Wednesdays are reserved for focus work; we keep chatter to a minimum and meetings to none.
We, like everyone, rely on Zoom. We don’t have long threads in Slack, and we never use email internally, so getting on a Zoom call for clarification is our go-to solution. It feels like a lot of face time since we work closely together. Being able to work on Product User Interface (UI) design at the same time as other UX designers in Figma and share them in actual scale with our clients beats out trying to present screens in a conference room any day.
Another go-to tool for us is Loom. It’s screen recording software with really good transcripts, speed controls, and the ability to leave a comment at a certain time stamp and link to it. We do some pretty in-depth User Experience (UX) work with our clients and record the meetings. Later in the week, we’ll come back to the meeting, drop in comments on different tasks, and have access to the clients’ thoughts from the meeting at all times. Some of our clients are really, really smart. It’s hard to keep up when two technical founders, both ex-Googlers, really get going.
Remote work came at a good time for me, personally. A few years ago, I went completely deaf in one ear. It took about a year to go from hearing to deafness, a quick progression that baffled several doctors. We eventually found the cause, a vestibular schwannoma, a non-cancerous tumor on a nerve in my inner ear. The tumor, and most of my inner ear, were removed, and a cochlear ear implant was installed earlier this year.
The ability to control the volume of everyone I talk to and to use transcription tools like Loom and the closed captions of Zoom (which aren’t nearly as good as Google Meet) meant that losing my hearing didn’t impact my clients or coworkers as much as it would in a traditional setting. It’s also given me a whole new appreciation for web and UX accessibility. We can do such small things as website and product builders to include everyone that I’m glad to be in a position to make those impacts and share the learnings.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Anchor & Alpine is a User Experience (UX) agency located in Salt Lake City, Utah. We create and improve experiences for websites and product user interfaces (UI). Our focus is on the group of people that come into any project—not just the end user but the experience of everyone involved, from the client to the developers to the editors. We think that good UX extends to good client relationships. Our clients come to us if they have a website or a product that needs to be refined. We create WordPress websites for medium to large businesses and asses and improve the user experience of websites on a variety of platforms. We work with VC-funded founders and teams to take their Product UI to the next level with a UX team that has garnered awards, patents, recognition, and results.
We are deeply focused on ethics and take our stance at the crossroads of early AI and UX very seriously. We see the dark UX patterns out there, and we always keep the good of the user in mind.
As part of our work building demand-generation websites for CMOs and marketing departments and our Product UI work for founders and product managers, we’ve learned a thing or two about Product Marketing.
Our design team is wicked good at taking a product UI or concept and making an artistic abstraction that conveys meaning and exemplifies the brand. Our animation team takes those images and makes them interactive and full of storytelling and life. Our development team brings all that magic to the web, helping your company’s product, marketing, and website streamline like never before. Our websites deliver uncommon results.
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
I’ve had a long career as a graphic designer to UXer, and I’ve made several pivots over the years, some for personal and some for career reasons. I got into graphic design because I saw it as a way to pursue my passion for art and my desire to live an elevated life. I was on my second job out of college when I got into web design. The web was still new then, and I first learned to hold websites using tables.
I continued in web design and met my husband and business partner, who had web development experience and was, at that time, a system admin and security officer. We got married, his company was sold to Raytheon, and we decided to make a go of running a web agency.
Years later, he got sick, and no one could figure out why. After years of trying to find a diagnosis, his doctor settled on Crohn’s, a systemic disease that causes your immune system to attack your intestines. During the time that he was searching for an answer and not getting out of bed for sometimes months at a time, I had to pivot quickly from web, since I was not a web developer, and I was lucky to find User Experience (UX) Design.
UX design was and still is my true love, uniting art, graphic design, psychology, data, and humans. I followed the UX pivot all the way to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was head of UX and Product at a machine learning company. I spent a few years helping people work better with large datasets, specifically in the film industry. When I left that job, I came home to Salt Lake City and basically screwed around until the opportunity to acquire two design agencies and fold them into my original one—the web firm my partner had kept going while I went off to play with AI in Berkley—and create what is now Anchor & Alpine.
Anchor & Alpine focused primarily on brands and websites since that is where the bulk of the business was coming from, but over the course of the last three years, we’ve transitioned into being a UX agency that creates and improves websites and product UIs. I kept drifting back to my first love—UX and how humans and computers interact. When the lead front-end designer at the agency said she was ready to move to UX, I knew the time was right for our agency to focus on that line of business as our core.
Do you have any insights you can share related to maintaining high team morale?
I’ve had a long career as a graphic designer to UXer, and I’ve made several pivots over the years, some for personal and some for career reasons. I got into graphic design because I saw it as a way to pursue my passion for art and my desire to live an elevated life. I was on my second job out of college when I got into web design. The web was still new then, and I first learned to hold websites using tables.
I continued in web design and met my husband and business partner, who had web development experience and was, at that time, a system admin and security officer. We got married, his company was sold to Raytheon, and we decided to make a go of running a web agency.
Years later, he got sick, and no one could figure out why. After years of trying to find a diagnosis, his doctor settled on Crohn’s, a systemic disease that causes your immune system to attack your intestines. During the time that he was searching for an answer and not getting out of bed for sometimes months at a time, I had to pivot quickly from web, since I was not a web developer, and I was lucky to find User Experience (UX) Design.
UX design was and still is my true love, uniting art, graphic design, psychology, data, and humans. I followed the UX pivot all the way to the San Francisco Bay Area, where I was head of UX and Product at a machine learning company. I spent a few years helping people work better with large datasets, specifically in the film industry. When I left that job, I came home to Salt Lake City and basically screwed around until the opportunity to acquire two design agencies and fold them into my original one—the web firm my partner had kept going while I went off to play with AI in Berkley—and create what is now Anchor & Alpine.
Anchor & Alpine focused primarily on brands and websites since that is where the bulk of the business was coming from, but over the course of the last three years, we’ve transitioned into being a UX agency that creates and improves websites and product UIs. I kept drifting back to my first love—UX and how humans and computers interact. When the lead front-end designer at the agency said she was ready to move to UX, I knew the time was right for our agency to focus on that line of business as our core.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://anchoralpine.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/anchoralpine/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/anchorandalpine/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAMRf7Iu4K-ZKvajBtNNIag
Image Credits
AIGA-portfolio-review-2023-02 – (Left) Creative Director Caroline Petriello (Right) Amber Sawaya, interviewing Annie Kate Peterson at the AIGA Student Portfolio Review 2023. Image Credit: AIGA Salt Lake City Chapter Boardable Mockup – Our work for the Boardable website hung alongside all other AIGA 100 Show winners in a gallery in downtown Salt Lake City, 2023. Penguin-encounter.jpg – (Left) Amber Sawaya, (Center) Joey Johnston, (Right) Katie Griffin. After the publishing of our children’s book for our client, we took a copy of it to the local Penguin Encounter and shared our book about penguins with real penguins. Photo credit: Amanda Nelson Photography AIGA2021-show.jpg – During the 2021 AIGA Show, our designer, Katie Griffin, racked up several awards, including the coveted best of show, a Copper Ingot. We joined her at the opening to see all of the entries. (Left) Principal Partner Amber Sawaya, Partner Steve Sawaya, Creative Director Caroline Petriello, Front-end Dev / UX Abigail Mitchell. Photo credit: Amanda Nelson Photography Anchoralpine Lagoon – As part of our remote work philosophy, we get our crew together to do a few fun things. Here we are as a rollercoaster takes off! From left, front: Kristen Harmon (Front-end Dev), Abigail Mitchelle (Front-end Dev / UX), Joey Johnston (Designer + UX Specialist), Chase Wood (Backend Dev), Amber Sawaya (Principal Partner), Steve Sawaya (Partner). Photo credit: Kristen Harmon