Foursquare's first designer, Mari Sheibley, decided to Check Out after four years

In a piece entitled "Goodbye Foursquare", has its first designer, Mari Sheibley, know at all that it has decided to leave the company.

She explained how she had heard of its founder and CEO Dennis Crowley:

In early December, 2008, I received an email from Dennis Crowley asking if I wanted to help him and his buddy Naveen on a new "project".

I said yes.

The rest, as they say, is history. Foursquare is renowned as one of the applications more beautifully designed and visually attractive, available on mobile devices. It's not just tell me this, read the reviews on the App Store or Google. The insight that reveals a Sheibley in his play is informative and shows exactly where the company may go, to tell us where it comes from:

This "project" has been called Foursquare. It is recording where you've been, share with friends and discover new places. For someone like me that allows recording all the bars that I had been in a Word doc, it was perfect. I could tell there was something special about Foursquare at the outset. The energy and enthusiasm that Dennis and exuded Naveen was infectious and the product is addictive. It did not matter that they couldn't pay me, I wanted to just be a part of something that I thought.

From the beginning to the salon of coffee, to more than 150 employees of more "three offices on two continents", things have of course changed. Sheibley describes how much a part of her and her work within the Foursquare that we use today, including all these neat badges that we collect:

I drew hundreds of icons for the web user interface design of badges and Android and, above all, iOS. I looked at the product evolve from a simple service check-in at a robust recommendation engine. I have designed t-shirts, fake tattoos cut, he founded Tuesday to hand tie and oversaw the design side of a recast transverse mass app. It has been a wild ride, but like all good things must come to an end.

In the same way that the first Twitter was grateful to one of its founders, Ev Williams, it is clear that Sheibley leave fond memories. It will work on? She did not say:

I am ready to tackle new problems and help other entrepreneurs to bring their vision to life, just as I have with Dens and Naveen all these years.

It will be interesting to see what's next. We can guess that it will be beautiful. Foursquare is implemented in the foreseeable future, because it is clear that Sheibley design principles are deeply ingrained in the culture of the company.

Thanks for the tip, Danielbru.

[Photo credits: http://www.marisheibley.com/ and this.]

Foursquare is a network based location social which incorporates elements of game. Users share their location with friends by "archiving via a smartphone application" or by text message. Points are awarded for the record in different places. Users can connect to their Foursquare accounts on their Twitter and Facebook accounts that can be updated when a record is registered. By checking in a certain number of times or in different locations, users collect virtual badges. In addition, users...

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Dennis Crowley is a co-founder of Foursquare, a service of network social location-based. Previously, he co-founded Dodgeball, a network of the same kind which sold to Google in 2005. He was named among the "Top 35 innovative under 35" by Technology Review MIT's magazine (2005) and won the "Fast Money" bonus on the game show Family Feud (2009). Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Time Magazine, Newsweek, MTV...