John Merlino

{ Partner + User Experience Director }

As user experience director, John brings over 10 years of front end development, user experience and creative experience to Freshthrills. He developed a strong background in fine art and design studying illustration, painting and sculpture at the Huntington School of Fine Art. He then went on to attend Pratt Institute for Communication Design.

John first entered the professional web design industry in 1999 as a web designer and developer at Community Connect Inc (CCI). CCI designed, developed and maintained social and dating community websites geared towards minorities (BlackPlanet.com, AsianAvenue.com and MiGente.com). By working for CCI, he had the rare experience of building online social communities long before Facebook, MySpace or even Friendster were conceived. In 2003 he transitioned from a designer to a front-end developer. He focused on building applications in object oriented JavaScript, semantic XHTML/XML and clean pixel-perfect Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). This transition included a practice of Agile methodologies and an in-depth understanding of Web 2.0 product development.

By 2005 he began managing the 8 person front-end development team. He was responsible for day-to-day assistance through peer programming, code reviews, project and task estimating, knowledge of proprietary development environment, version control software, and bug tracking systems. John worked closely with designers, information architects and developers to ensure a tight implementation of the product.

John has used his unique blend of design and technology skill set to help lead Freshthrills to become an emerging creative studio.

---