First Fridays: io studio

My First Fridays feature is not about a typical artist. She’s not a designer,  yet she creates. She’s not an author,  yet she writes. What she produces, people generally never see, but without it the art wouldn’t be functional. She is Christina Reeser, web developer extraordinaire and owner of io studio.

When Christina speaks about programming and development she sounds like an artist. She’s modest, curious and insightful. She explains widgets, CMS, style sheets and scripting with the enthusiasm of a painter describing the sunset. If she has to modify a dimension, move an element or create a chart it always makes the website look and perform better.

She once told me that programmers are like chefs who “each cook a little differently in their own kitchen.” But when I’ve worked with other developers (some of whom Christina has gladly helped out) and they see her code, they often say, “Wow. I want to swipe this!”

Over 350 websites contain her “DNA,” as she calls it. As a designer craving sites that look like print, Christina is the perfect programmer to help prepare my pages. For just as her tagline says, Christina is where functionality meets form. {Beautifully}

When you visit Christina’s io studio website, I urge you to disregard the design. Instead, go under your browser’s pull-down menu “tools” and look for the site source. There, you’ll find <title>Io Studio, Inc</title> and a full site built in just 29 lines of {beautiful} jquery.