Thread by @patio11

Quoting for endorsement and professional interest.

(With how many companies need to “get developers” it is astonishing to me how few actually do, or who can direct any appreciable amount of creative energy at the task.)

https://twitter.com/alexellisuk/status/1362363460688961536

Worth noting that in addition to this unique artwork being a physical instantiation of one’s specific use of GitHub, which is genius, it’s also just “Spend artisan money on developer attention”, which should be math that doesn’t require genius to operate.

It’s more efficient to work with artists if you work with artists frequently than if you do it as a one-off. Art does scale. There are professionals who can be hired to help art scale.

There. Now, just find a piece of art many developers would like to have but haven’t arranged.

I would suggest “Profile photos or non-photographic representations” since you can easily have a house style apply to thousands of pieces which will be used for many, many years in a high visibility fashion.

(n.b. This is an absolute no brainer for engineering teams, too. “Badge photos which are definitely better than badge photos” is a trivial perk to offer. Which, uh, see my Twitter photo for “Oh I’d happily use a badge photo for my primary professional presences.”)

(Stripe badge photos have a distinctive style to them which, like many other parts of Stripe’s house style, was “A very small number of people with good taste cared more about this specific topic than almost anyone would consider reasonable, for years.”)

(And you might think “Ahh that sure seems wasteful spending professional energy on badge photos” right until you consider how useful it is that “We always have a good headshot in a consistent style for every employee at the company trivially available in high res” an invariant.)