We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Sarah Lennon a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Sarah, appreciate you joining us today. Is your team able to work remotely? If so, how have you made it work? What, if any, have been the pitfalls? What have been the non-obvious benefits?

Yes we have been working (mostly) remotely for the past 20 years now. Not 100% for sure, we’ve had numerous offices for client meetings and glad handing. But we are lucky enough to inhabit an environment of work that facilitates the remote approach. We can easily communicate amongst ourselves and with our clients from emails, phone calls, whatsapp etc. As long as everyone’s on the same page from a drive and attitude perspective, we have made it work just fine. This was magnified when Covid came along, when of course there wasn’t much choice.
With regard to downsides we see few. There is of course the possibility that someone is sleeping or walking the dog when allegedly working, but again that comes down to having the right team. If someone can work more efficiently after a short nap then its a win all around.
I think a primary benefit is the saving of time in commuting which also saves gas money and other overhead. And happier people make nbetter products we’ve always found.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I was working as an archaeologist in London UK, a rewarding, back-breaking and poorly paid job. I took a web design course and never looked back. Shortly after completion I moved to the United States to be with my new husband and we formed our design company. We started working largely in (then Macromedia) Flash making websites and expanded into branding, digital marketing and more code based website development.

My personal favorite among the things I do is generating animation, lately in Adobe After Effects. I do also love designing logos and then animating them. Delivering a top line brand package is of course the primary need of our clients, and sending folks on their journey with this in hand is incredibly satisfying (not to mention my job)

Learning and unlearning are both critical parts of growth – can you share a story of a time when you had to unlearn a lesson?

Just because you love it, and love doing it, doesn’t mean its for forever. When the smartphone rose it effectively killed Flash for websites. I loved Flash but it needs a mouse to function on a web environment. I had to learn to design all websites in photoshop and say goodbye to the software I’d worked with for so long. Steve Jobs in effect said “we’re done with flash on apple” and Android etc followed suit, they had to, given the technology.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

We met at an auction house in London where we were co-workers, just before he moved back from the UK to the US.
He was in the accounting department, I was more on the auction side. We kissed outside Harrods in Knightsbridge and that was basically it. Then he left and it took me a couple years to immigrate to the US (its complicated, trust me). When he left he worked for Comcast in Denver, Colorado, but we started to plot our future.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.bigorangeplanet.com/denver-web-design/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/big_orange_planet/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/big-orange-planet/