Facebook has hired partners of a design firm Teehan+Lax along with some of the key members. It must be noted that the social network has not acquired the design firm and this is just a talent acquisition.
Teehan+Lax’s three partners Jon Lax, Geoff Teehan, and David Gillis are all joining Facebook’s design team. The aforementioned designers could work on an entirely new feature or service for Facebook. Founded in 2002, Teehan+Lax did digital design work for hundreds of clients, notably the publishing platform Medium, social reader Flipboard and some recent work on Facebook’s Atlas ad-serving technology.
“The challenges that we will have at Facebook are challenges that interest us. They are primarily about making things that over a billion people will use… all over the world. The opportunity to work on interesting and meaningful problems at such scale is very compelling. This may seem like a contradiction given our struggles with trying to scale Teehan+Lax. But scaling a services business and working on design problems and teams at scale are very different challenges. The former wasn’t interesting to us but the latter is very appealing.”
posted Teehan+Lax on the company blog.
Facebook has acquired Wit.ai, an API for building voice-activated interfaces, and video infrastructure company QuickFire Networks from the beginning of this year.