Pros
The people. As a Designer, I learned a lot working with developers in-house for the first time in my career. I definitely grew into a more confident web designer by getting experience designing responsive websites while learning UX/UI best practices from the talented Dev team.
Cons
Sandstorm’s overall processes were the most difficult/frustrating I’d experienced in my five years of agency work. I struggled with the inconsistencies and hour-obsessive culture my entire time there. Creative work suffers due to the small amount of hours budgeted to complete a project. This is the only place I’ve worked that doesn’t believe in Creative Briefs or any sort of upfront creative discussions/brainstorming team meetings. As a Designer, you don’t get to work with a Creative team on coming up with multiple ideas for a project simply because all of the clients’ budgets are too low. The Account Managers don’t invite team members to any upfront, informative client meetings in an effort to save billable hours on their project/not go over budget, but this in turn leads to the team being out of the loop throughout the rest of the project. Also, it’s in Ravenswood and will never leave Ravenswood.