Rob Kleiman

Ideas On Purpose

Pfizer's 2013 Annual Review microsite, "I thrive."

Ideas On Purpose: where it started

My first job after college was at Ideas On Purpose, a New York creative agency that helps companies communicate their sustainability and impact through reports, websites, campaigns and brand. Its clients include Fortune 100 companies, and I joined the team that turned corporate annual reports into interactive microsites.

It’s the job that started it all.

What I did

I coordinated projects and carried out quality assurance from development through launch:

  • Project coordination. Managing assets, proofreading and keeping writers, designers and developers moving toward the same launch date.
  • Quality assurance. Testing every page before a client or their investors saw it, across browsers and operating systems. We built on Macs, but plenty of readers were on Windows and older Internet Explorer, so I ran Microsoft’s free Internet Explorer test images as virtual machines on the Mac (the approach Joe Maller wrote up) and checked every page in the browsers our audience actually used.
  • Support for the build teams. Logging what was broken, checking the fixes, and repeating until it was right.

Falling for the browser

This is where I first opened Chrome DevTools and never really closed it. Inspecting how a page was built, checking layouts at different screen sizes and tracking down why something looked wrong taught me to look under the hood of the web instead of just at it. That curiosity led to forking a Rails marketplace for Creators’ Clubhouse, and eventually to a career in developer marketing.

The projects