Felipe Memoria

I'm a designer and Founding Partner at Work & Co, a product design and development firm with offices in Brooklyn, Portland, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen and Belgrade. We started the company in 2013 and we're about 400 people now.

Get in touch

Long bio: I started my career in Brazil where I led design in a team at Globo.com—the largest media company in Latin America. We did good work at the time, including the creation of the most popular sports site in the country.

While at Globo, I wrote a book about User Experience that ended up becoming very popular with the local design community. It sells pretty well to this day, even though it was written in 2005.

I moved to the US to work at Huge in 2007 when the company was only 60 people. In three years I was made partner. I led the design of some of Huge’s most successful projects - including HBO GO, TED Talks, Pepsi Refresh and CNN.com. I also founded the Rio de Janeiro office, helped Huge expand to Portland, and helped grow the offices on the West Coast and in Europe. I managed over 100 designers across 6 offices.

In 2013 I left to found Work & Co. We are a team composed by many of the most talented people I know.

I have a MS in Usability and HCI and a BS in Visual Design, both from PUC-Rio, where I also taught for two years before moving to the US.

I’m a member of the IADAS and served as judge in several industry competitions including the One Show Interactive.

Personal: I'm Brazilian, American and Portuguese. I was born and raised in Rio de Janeiro. The Memoria family has a tradition in architecture. My great-grandfather, Archimedes Memoria, was the first of them. I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by great references: from Joaquim Tenreiro furniture to living in an award winning building designed by my mom and later in a house designed by Archimedes.

Today I live between DUMBO and New Canaan with my wife and my son. I often go to Brazil for business.

For more about me ask around.

Work & Co Recognition

• Built in NYC's 100 Best Places to Work in 2020
• Fast Co’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Design 2019
• Fast Co’s 10 Most Innovative Companies in Design 2017
• Digiday's 2018 Agency of the Year
• Ad Age Agency A-List 2020: Standouts
• Ad Age Agency A-List 2019: #6
• Ad Age Agency A-List 2018: Standouts
• Ad Age Agency A-List 2017: Standouts
• Ad Age Agency A-List 2016: One to Watch

Career Awards

• 12 Webby Awards
• 2 Cannes Lions
• 2 One Show Pencils
• 2 Clio Awards
• 1 Red Dot Award
• 1 London Awards
• 2 UX Awards
• 2 IxDA Interaction Awards
• 2 Mobi Awards
• 2 OMMAs
• 6 Pixel Awards
• 1 Apple’s Best iPad Apps
• N/N Group’s Intranet Design Award

Personal projects

Bike design 1
• Bike design 2

Elsewhere

• Twitter
• LinkedIn

New York Office

• 231 Front St, 5th Floor
  Brooklyn, NY 11201
• ★★

VirginAmerica.com was the project that launched Work & Co. It got a lot of attention from the industry and has been widely studied, copied and referenced. Read the Forrester Research report and the UX Pin case study. Watch Joe Stewart and I speaking at the UX Awards, where we won the Grand Prize. The project has won 18 industy awards including a Cannes Lion and three Webby Awards three years in a row in three different categories: mobile, best practices and user experience.

I've been working with Eurosport in Paris on and off since 2012. I've designed Eurosport.com, their global design system across apps and the Eurosport Player for the web, iOS, Android, Windows, Xbox and PlayStation. The Player's unique, consistent UI accross platforms is printed on top of the full screen video no matter the page. For that design we've won a Red Dot Design Award, a One Show Pencil, a Pixel Award and were also a finalist for the IxDA Awards. Check out the Eurosport Player case study.

My last project at Huge was the responsive redesign of TED. My favorite feature was the video page mini player that later was copied by several sites. The project won seven Webby Awards in 2015.

HBO GO is likely to be the most successful product ever launched by Huge. Our first project was the iPad app. In parallel, we designed the iPhone and Android versions, and later a prototype for smart TVs. Then we designed for Roku, Xbox, Kindle and PlayStation. One of the main ideas was the continuity concept—users could start watching in one device and resume from where they left in another one. It was the first time this was ever done. HBO GO won more than 10 industry awards.

Design para a Internet was published in 2005.

The book is basically about UX and was published in Portuguese only by Elsevier. It ended up becoming very popular and it somehow influenced a generation of designers in Brazil. I wrote it in one month almost without sleeping. I was 26 at the time.

• Compre
• Forbes interview on influential books
• Full list of recommended books

Talks

I try to focus most of my time in making things. But sometimes I do give talks—once or twice a year. Send me an email if you want me to speak at your event. Past experience:

• IXDA Interaction Latin America, Rio de Janeiro
• Designation Conference, New York
• AIGA Y Design Conference, San Diego
• Fast Company Innovation Festival, Brooklyn
• Design Thinkers, Toronto
• Future of Storytelling, Brooklyn
• UX Awards, San Francisco
• WOB, Wide Open Business, Rio de Janeiro
• NYC UXPA, Brooklyn
• 3° EBAI, São Paulo
• World Usability Day, Rio de Janeiro
• II Encart, Londrina
• 11° Encontro de Web Design, Rio de Janeiro
• III Fórum de Design, Manaus
• iMasters InterCon, São Paulo
• ECCE-12, York
• 3° USIHC, Rio de Janeiro
• 2° USIHC, Rio de Janeiro

PRESS

• Podcast ExPatria (Portuguese)
• UXLab—YouTube (Portuguese)
• Podcast Movimento UX (Portuguese)
• AIGA Eye on Design
• Campaign
• UX Pin
• Forbes
• The 8 Qualities of a Great Design Leader
• Jornal Hoje—Rede Globo
• National Geographic
• National Geographic—raw
• Digiday
• Webby Awards
• Revista Wide
• Ad Age
• TheFWA
• The New York Times
• Dinheiro Não é Tudo
• Um Traço Brasileiro no Design da Web
• The New Rules for Designing for the iPad
• Desconstruindo Interfaces
• Planeje o Site Perfeito
• Bola da Vez 2
• Bola da Vez 1
• Capes.gov.br
• Sinfonia das Cores
• O que é que esse site tem?
• Ícones: quando usar
• Usabilidade made in Brazil
• Sobe ou desce?
• Você confia em segurança na internet?
• Redação iMasters

Masters Dissertation

I sometimes joke I'm the world's greatest specialist in Breadcrumbs. That was the theme of my thesis. Do they work or not? The answer: only if people are really lost. But if people find their way via other methods, breadcrumbs are completely useless. The thesis is in Portuguese only.

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