Who we are
We're here to do great work and be great company while we do it. We treat our clients like friends, because that's who we want to work with.
Our Practice
A specialized practice built for complex digital challenges.
When your mission impacts real lives, complex digital challenges require dedicated, senior-level practitioners from kickoff to launch. We use a bespoke, Principal-led model designed specifically to eliminate cognitive debt and maximize your budget. By pairing expert foundational design with an agile, purpose-built production team, we guarantee the right minds are always in the work.
How we structure our team:
- Practice-level oversight ensures every engagement meets the rigorous Hostile Sheep benchmark. Our founder, Jordan Julien, stays deeply connected to the work across our entire portfolio. He actively challenges the strategy and holds our Principals to an uncompromising standard of design quality, guaranteeing nothing leaves our doors unless it actively removes friction.
- A dedicated Principal acts as the lead practitioner on your project pod rather than just a manager. These seasoned experts are deeply in the work. They do the heavy cognitive lifting, design the foundational architecture, and establish the core patterns of your digital experience.
- A bespoke bench of apprentices and specialists drives the agile production engine on each pod. The exact composition of each pod is established on a project-by-project basis. Once the Principal establishes the core system, the right talent is brought in to seamlessly flesh out the broader ecosystem, execute specific research, and run testing with speed and precision.
Because this model pairs a Principal building the foundational experience with a team scaling the production, your budget goes entirely toward solving the problem. You get senior-level hands in the actual work where it matters most, followed by highly efficient execution. This ensures your funding is spent exactly where it belongs: on protecting your users and driving your mission forward.
Our Story
Losing our brand and finding our mission.
To understand why we had to rebuild Hostile Sheep from the ground up, you first have to understand why we built it in the first place. The name started as a provocation. People were being treated like sheep; expected to stay quiet, follow orders, and accept systems that weren't built for them. Hostile Sheep was born from the instinct to push back. We refuse to accept harm as inevitable or use complexity as an excuse to ignore impact. Being "hostile" isn't about aggression; it is about fierce protection. We stand with our herd, but we are not docile. We are here to create with the people that broken systems have left behind and this is our story:
- The concept for Hostile Sheep took shape in 2012 during a time when human-centered design was becoming a performative buzzword. While the design world was adopting all the right language about caring for users, it remained stubbornly stuck in its traditional ways of working. Our founder, Jordan Julien, developed a deep desire or a more authentic approach finally found a home when a freelance contract with General Electric's R&D team evolved into a five-year retained partnership, providing the perfect proving ground to officially launch the practice.
- A shift in GE's partnership model in 2016 forced us to look outward. We initially tried to collaborate with communication shops but our quick and nimble way of working was an immediate culture shock. Because we delivered results so efficiently, we often didn't fit into the slower, high-overhead models, proving that we were better suited for a different kind of relationship.
- In 2017, we began reaching out directly to organizations that prioritized human outcomes over billable hours. The response was immediate. We grew from a small handful of projects to serving over thirty organizations at our peak, proving there was a massive appetite for a practice that valued speed and transparency.
- For the next 5 years we began operating at capacity, which gave us the freedom to choose projects that aligned deeply with our values. While we worked across verticals like healthcare, education, and financial services, it became clear that we weren't just specializing in industries, we were specializing in missions. We focused our energy on the essential pillars of a stable life: food security, health literacy, financial resilience, educational equality, and more. We realized our true work was protecting the human at the other end of the screen.
- In 2023, our pursuit of growth eventually led us to merger talks with a larger consultancy, which meant saying a difficult goodbye to the Hostile Sheep name. While the partnership seemed promising at the start, we eventually realized our core identities were too different to remain combined. We made the difficult choice to unmerge, which left Hostile Sheep broken and unrecognizable, setting the stage for our most significant challenge yet.
- 2025 has been a period of deep reflection and rediscovery. I knew I needed to find the heart of the practice again before I could rebuild it. This brings us to today: the relaunch of Hostile Sheep. We are back to our roots as a digital, human-centric ally for organizations that want to challenge the status quo and build sustainable, resilient success through holistic design.
Our Values
What we stand for
We don't just build products; we protect people. We believe that the digital world is cluttered with waste. Waste comes in many forms; assumptions, unnecessary friction, inefficiencies, dark patterns that erode trust and waste human potential. We design for resilience in a world of digital waste and ground ourselves in some foundational principles:
- We fight cognitive debt. Every unnecessary step and every confusing interface puts strain on your user’s brain. We relentlessly audit and eliminate digital waste to ensure your system is as lean and effective as possible.
- We prioritize the margins. Most design optimizes for the average, typical, user. We start at the edges. When a system is safe and intuitive for those who need the most care, it becomes a better experience for everyone.
- We restore human agency. Technology should empower people, not manipulate them. We design transparent systems that give users the information and control they need to make the best decisions for themselves.
- We think holistically, not just digitally. A screen is only one part of a human journey. We look at the entire ecosystem, such as the politics, the legacy systems, and the lived experiences, to ensure our solutions work in real life contexts; not just when a user is in front of their screen.