Long-form essays on craft, process, and the economics of premium. Quarterly. Unsponsored. Eleven essays, two years.
The site went to production. The team takes a screenshot. The client posts on LinkedIn. We stay silent. This essay is about why we leave three weeks of silence between release and the public case study, what we fill that period with, and why a photo taken in the site's first hour catches only half the work.
A field note on the rules we keep in the studio: what can be handed to an assistant, what never can, and why that boundary shifts every six months. And on why this site is an example of what such a boundary looks like in practice.
Of sixty briefs last year we took four. This essay is about how we declined the rest. On honest wording, on recommending colleagues, on why a good refusal is remembered longer than a yes, and why we consider it part of our marketing.
A long read on how we build sites where turning off JavaScript doesn't break them. On users you can't see in analytics, on bots that read only HTML, and on why 'progressive enhancement' isn't a relic of the 2010s but a property of good engineering.
A field note on why typography carries a premium identity further than any photograph. On type pairs, on a single accent color, and on how the silence between blocks is part of the identity too.
On why every one of our projects includes three weeks of dense support and another three months on call, free. On what those periods include, what they don't, and why we consider release not the finish but the first day of operation.
A practical guide to writing a brief that gets you a useful answer — from any studio, not only ours. On what should be in it, what shouldn't, and how to avoid five typical mistakes that keep good projects from coming together.
A field note on how we hold a site's performance at a premium level — not on the day of handoff, but for years ahead. On rules in CI, budgets in code, and on what a machine can check and what it can't.
A note on capacity. On why the studio takes three or four projects a year — no more — and what that gives to quality, the calendar, and client relationships. And on what we don't do to make it work.
On how the studio reduced its language of movement to four curves and six durations. On what motion does in a premium site, and on what it shouldn't do. A note for designers tired of choosing a curve from scratch for every button.
On opening a small studio the year everyone said small studios were dead. They didn't die — but they changed so much the old definition stopped working. A note on why we launched against the calendar, and what we saw in a market analysts had already buried.
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