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Who we are
RUE studio is a development studio in Zurich making digital (and occasionally magical) ideas, products and experiences. Not an agency that draws things and hands them on, and not a shop waiting for a finished brief: the people who think it up are the people who build it. Better for the people and organisations we work with, better for their users, better for us, and better for our planet. That is a lot to ask of design and engineering — but we checked with both, and they are entirely fine with it.
House rules
A studio this size does not need a mission statement. It needs a few lines you can point at in the middle of a project, when the question comes up whether the awkward part really still has to be done.
Seven of them. They came out of real commissions, not out of a workshop day.
If a project needs the part nobody wants — the migration, the alt text, the legal page, reprinting the signs — then it is ours. Half a job is not a job, and the awkward half is usually the one everything hangs on in the end.
Everything we hand over has to keep running without us: documentation, access, sensible defaults. Anyone who builds in a dependency to stay needed has misunderstood the work.
An honest no beats something we built while knowing better. “You have come to the wrong studio for this” is a complete piece of work too.
An idea only counts once it stands at the edge of a field, hangs above a counter, or works on a tired phone on a train. What holds up only in the design file has not passed the test, it has skipped it.
Disagree hard, openly, and about the thing itself. Then a decision gets made, and afterwards you stand behind it as if it were your own. Politeness that swallows an objection helps nobody.
Something unfinished on Tuesday beats something beautiful in three weeks. Work hidden until it is done is work nobody could help with any more.
There are no points here for suffering quietly over a problem somebody else solved last year. Two hours of searching is diligence; two days is stubbornness.
The crew
Small, and it changes. Anyone wanting to know how the work goes here should read the house rules above — they are more honest than a list of job titles.
Founded by Ruanin Khankah, Senior Software Engineer, in Zurich. What is called “we” here is a small workshop with regular collaborators — and when it matters, you are talking to the person who also builds.
The crew is small and it changes. The fastest way to meet them is to bring a problem.
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