Closing notes for a strange year

The studio is closing for two weeks tomorrow. A few quick notes before the lights go off.

The work shipped. Not as much as we’d planned in February, but the projects that did go out were stronger than the ones we lost, and the studio is in better shape going into 2021 than it was going into 2020. There is no good way to say that without sounding insensitive about a difficult year. Both things can be true.

A short list of things I learned, written down so I do not forget them.

A weekly written check-in is a better team-management tool than three video calls. Five questions. Twenty minutes to answer. Fifteen minutes for me to read. Replaces a lot of meeting time. We are keeping it.

Clients do not need most of the polish layer that studios assume they do. The pages that went out without bespoke illustration, without custom photography, without the second round of micro-animation, performed exactly as well as the ones that had all of it. The polish layer was, in many cases, a thing the studio had been adding for the studio’s own portfolio.

A no, said politely and early in the conversation, makes more friends than a yes that the studio cannot deliver. I have known this for years. I am still learning it.

The thing I am taking into 2021 is a smaller list of priorities and a longer list of clients I want to keep working with. Both of those are at the expense of the third option, which is the rolling hunt for new work, and which is what most studios spend most of their year on. I do not yet know whether this is the right move. I will report back.

The reading list for the year is here. The piece on going remote earlier in the year, which now reads as a snapshot of a particular weird moment, is here. Both the A11y Project checklist and Heydon Pickering’s Inclusive Components shaped a lot of this year’s work, if you missed those references the first time.

Happy holidays.