“I met Tamara many years ago in a bar in Montana with a half basketball court built into it, and things have only gotten better since then. I worked with her on more projects than I can remember: rebrandings, site builds, UX overhauls and everything in between. And right before I wrote this rec, I excitedly agreed to another. Tamara is exceptionally talented at recruiting, managing, and leading small interdisciplinary teams. As a ambi-brainer, she wrangles creatives like me while keeping an eye toward strategy. She’s naturally easy to rally around, and it’s my fervent hope that she never starts a cult. Because I will surely join. The company she founded, Studio Simpatico, is a smooth-running extension of these soft and hard skills. It’s a pleasure to be part of the team there, and a pleasure to work for and with Tamara. Hire her or apply for a position, depending on who you are that’s reading this.”

— William Fleing, Copywriter

“Tamara is the WordPress developer and consultant you need to hire. Working with Tamara on a project to port a website from a Ruby app to WordPress, she was extremely fast and an incredible communicator. I’m still in awe of how much she accomplished in such a short amount of time, how flawless her work is, and how she made it seem so easy.”

– Lauren Berk, Former Marketing Manager, 3D Robotics

“Because Tamara is a developer, she is able to quickly understand what we are looking for, and has the know-how to build it. She also takes a much more turn-key approach to development. Rather than reinventing the wheel – she is able to recommend best practices when exploring new layouts, features or functionality. She is really good at scoping out a project, understanding what we need, and being able to move really quickly. She uses Basecamp to keep all stakeholders and assets organized around a project. She is able to move really quickly but also maintain quality. She implements just the right amount of process, project management, and production so we’re organized but can move quickly and efficiently.”

– Ashley La Fond, Head of Marketing, SocialCode

“Tamara Olson’s work is simply stellar! She designed our new interactive book site from soup to nuts, flawlessly handled every change and curveball we sent her way, and managed extraordinarily busy people with grace and kindness. She is talented in design and web architecture, technically very capable, an efficient and budget conscious project manager and accountable for meeting deadlines on budget to a fault. In short, she’s a total gem.”

– Michael Levine, Chief Knowledge Officer, Sesame Workshop

“Once we found Tamara Olson, it was as if a weight had been lifted. We needed a clear, compelling and customized website in a very short time frame. Tamara came to the rescue. Her skills at building state-of-the-art websites are top-notch, full of creativity, flexibility, and a keen eye for beauty. Smart, reliable, and open-minded, she was a professional through and through.”

– Lisa Guernsey, Director, New America

“I’m most impressed with Tamara — she’s a delight to work with. She has managed our expectations well and kept to the budget. Her whole team is also great, but Tamara is the kind of person you’ll want to be friends with. There’s pleasantness and professionalism about her.In addition, Tamara understands what AmpleHarvest.org is. She has understood who we are on day one, and that’s really important for me.”

– Gary Oppenheimer, Founder, AmpleHarvest.org

“Tamara is a UX architect and designer with a deep understanding of the Internet and a mastery of its visual language. Tamara and I worked closely on a months-long project for which she was the UX architect and I was the lead developer. Working with her was a pleasure. She took the time to understand our users’ needs as well as the limitations of the system we were working with and the realities of the software development life cycle. In the final weeks of the project, she took up the mantle of the QA analyst and thoroughly documented every problem she found. She even filtered all the defects reported by end users, raising only the legitimate bugs to the development team. This was immensely helpful, and undoubtedly pushed the project over the finish line. Many UX architects blithely create a static, monolithic design that may address what a user needs but doesn’t necessarily relate to the bigger picture of the system to which it belongs. Worse yet for developers, some UX architects wield their design as a sword, threatening to decapitate any change that comes their way. Not Tamara. She constantly triangulates her approach and strives to understand every force at play in the system. For Tamara, user experience is a conversation, not a lecture. She really wants her work to be accessible to her users and to her colleagues, while maintaining a clear focus and strong vision–a rarity in a world of obdurate UX architects and their joyless, worn-out designs. Any team would find Tamara’s broad knowledge helpful, friendly demeanor refreshing, and any business would benefit from her creativity, insight, and tenacity. I recommend Tamara without reservation.”

– Austin Smith, CEO, Alley