Nathan Curtis is a founder and principal at EightShapes, LLC, a user experience consulting firm based in Washington, DC. Nathan has been practicing varied disciplines within user experience design since 1996, and areas of interest include information architecture, interaction design, usability research, and front-end development. Through EightShapes, Nathan has helped improve the user experience for clients in the Washington DC area as well as across the United States.

Prior to founding EightShapes, Nathan led UX efforts at Sprint Nextel, Inc for projects that include ecommerce shopping and checkout, content management, account management and bill pay, and web portals for wireless device data synchronization. During the 2005 merger process between Sprint and Nextel, Nathan served as the user experience lead on the large, diverse creative team that unified and rebranded the online presence of sprint.com, nextel.com, sprintpcs.com, and approximately 200 related online products and applications in just five months.

In the more distant past, Nathan was a principal owner at BIG fish in Washington DC from 2000-2003. He lead user experience projects for federal and corporate clients via services that included information architecture, user interface design, graphic design, usability engineering, and application development. He started his career at SAS Institute in Cary, North Carolina, as a technical specialist in statistical applications R&D. This experience introduced him to UI design, information architecture, and usability research, and enabled Nathan to evolve into software and web development. Nathan is educated in mathematics and statistics, having obtained a BS summa cum laude from Virginia Tech in 1995 followed by a masters degree from the University of Chicago in 1996 after one year.

Nathan enjoys writing about and realizing the potential of various tools of the information architect, including Microsoft Visio and Adobe's InDesign and Illustrator. He has presented at the Information Architecture Summit on wireframes and deliverables, and has also published on boxesandarrows.com. He blogs at www.nathancurtis.com and currently lives in Fairfax, VA with his wife and two children.