2014

1. 01 2014

   Two desks above a bike shop

   One projector, one client, one rule we never dropped: ship the thing before the deck explains it. The bike shop below us opened at six, so we learned to work through the noise of a compressor and a radio tuned to a station none of us would have chosen. The first invoice took eleven weeks to clear and we framed the remittance advice, which is still on the wall by the kettle.

2. 02 2015

   The first hire read the contract twice

   She asked what happened when a build ran late, and the answer we gave her became how we scope everything now. Every project since has carried a written contingency and a named person who decides how it gets spent, which sounds like bureaucracy until the week it saves a launch. She stayed six years and the policy has outlasted her by three.

3. 03 2016

   The launch that broke the analytics

   A hundred thousand visits in nine hours, and a server bill that arrived like a parking ticket. We learned what a homepage costs when every section animates at once, and we learned it in public, on a Tuesday, while the client watched the same dashboard we did. The rebuild took four days and shipped at a third of the weight, which is the version still running.

4. 04 2017

   A year of saying no

   Eleven projects turned down, four taken. The four are still in the portfolio and the eleven would not have been, which is a sentence that took a year of uncomfortable phone calls to be able to write. Turnover fell by a fifth and stayed there for two quarters before it climbed past where it started.

5. 05 2018

   We stopped pitching slides

   Prototypes only. If the interaction cannot survive a scroll wheel in the room, it does not survive the internet, and a slide will let you believe otherwise for as long as it takes to sign the contract. We lost two pitches in the first month to studios with better decks, then stopped losing them.

6. 06 2019

   A second room, and a rule about it

   The room was for building, not for calls. It is the only studio policy that has never once been argued about, and the only one nobody wrote down for the first two years because it did not seem like a policy, just a door people did not take a laptop through. We put a sign on it eventually, mostly for visitors.

7. 07 2020

   Everything fitted into a spare bedroom

   Six weeks to move a studio into six flats. The work got quieter and, for a while, considerably better: fewer meetings, longer stretches, and a shared document that turned out to be doing most of the job the second room had been doing. We kept the document and gave up the lease.

8. 08 2021

   Motion became the practice

   Timing, easing and restraint moved from the last week of a build into the first sketch of one. Motion stopped being the thing you added once the layout was signed off and became a constraint on what got drawn at all, which killed a lot of ideas early and saved the rest. Our estimates got more accurate the same quarter, and we do not think that is a coincidence.

9. 09 2022

   The principles got written down

   Nine pages. Most of it is about when not to animate, which is the part new designers read twice and the part clients quote back at us in kickoff meetings. It has been revised four times and has never got longer, because the rule we set ourselves was that anything added has to displace something already there.

10. 10 2023

    Thirty-one people, four time zones

    Still one studio. The handover notes got longer; the animations got shorter. Four time zones means a decision made at four in the afternoon in one place is a decision someone wakes up to, so we write more down and interrupt each other far less than we did with everyone in a single room.

11. 11 2024

    The library opened to everyone

    Every timing curve, every helper, every argument we had already had, published and versioned and free to take. It cost us a quarter of billable time and returned more inbound work than any campaign we have ever run, which was not the reason we did it but is the reason it survived the budget review.

12. 12 2025

    One easing curve, a thousand sites

    The same six lines of configuration shipped more work last year than the studio did in its first five, on sites we will never see, for teams who have never emailed us. That is the part nobody warns you about: the thing you are proudest of arrives as a download counter and not as a launch.

13. 13 2026

    The chronicle you are scrolling

    Every year in the studio's history, handed off one snap at a time, and the entries are only as long as the story needs them to be. Drop your own into it, at whatever length your years actually deserve, and the stage will size to the longest one.

2014