Hello, new friend!
Our name’s
& we’d like to tell you…

We strive to make everything we touch more beautiful. We believe beauty is aesthetic, surface, but also ease of use, attitude, the feel of a thing. Two words doing the work of seven. Structure that guides you without your knowing. The perfect type combination. Mid-century rocket illustrations. Well, maybe not always the rockets.

Dan Manchester

Dan Manchester // Head ElseLooper

word jockey, code monkey, pixel wrangler, & imaginary astronaut

 

Erin Kuns

Erin Kuns // Task Master

data ninja, schedule guru, guardian of next, & trowel junkie

 

ElseLoop is a design, development, and writing studio located in Portland, OR. We work with clients across the United States on projects ranging from press releases and personal blogs to ecommerce solutions and product launches. Our clients are small businesses, national magazines, artists, writers, and non-profits. No matter who we’re working with, we aim for a semantic, forward-thinking codebase underlying a clean, user-friendly design. We really love to work with WordPress, but we’re happy in other environments as well.

Before ElseLoop, we were academics (a poet & an archaeologist, because why not?), and we still approach our work with that same mindset, taking the skills learned in those past lives and applying them to each new project:

  • We question.
  • We think.
  • We investigate.
  • We ask more questions.
  • We sketch.
  • We plan
  • We design.
  • We build.
  • We test.
  • We ask even more questions.
  • We rebuild.

And we keep rebuilding until all of the questions are answered, until all of the stakeholders are satisfied, until our job is done. Then we get excited for the next one.

Our name reflects this philosophy and our approach to life. In just about all programming languages, there are conditional checks that look for one thing to be true (for instance, 1+1=2) and provide a fallback for when that thing is false (1+1=3). In PHP, the language of WordPress, this often shows up as if/else pairs: If 1+1=2, do something; if not, do something else. And like even the most solid code, life sometimes takes unexpected turns and loops you through the else clause of the equation. It’s best practice to be prepared, ready to embrace the possibilities, and never stop testing. As for the rockets, well, we just dig ‘em is all. Sometimes that’s reason enough, too.