Field notes

Most of this, nobody writes down.

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Shopping with your eyes is one component. It is not the component that decides whether the thing ships.

Aesthetic is not experience.

Experience is not a preference, and it is not the thing on the screen in front of you. It is what the right person feels when they use your product — and that person is not in the room while you are choosing. Your taste is real and it matters. It is just not the instrument.

Fourteen years of engagements — including the ones we walked into halfway through, already on fire. Here is what we would want to know if we were the ones buying.

Buying it

How to pick a design partner

Everyone shows you their best work. That is the job of a portfolio and we are not going to pretend ours is different. The difference between studios shows up in the questions nobody puts on the website — so here they are.

Every portfolio is the best five percent

Photographed well, with the compromises cropped out. Fine — look at it, enjoy it, and then ask what the brief said on day one, what changed, and who made it change. That answer tells you more than the screens do.

Ask whether anybody else has already bought it

A template with the serial numbers filed off costs almost nothing to produce the second time and sells at full price. That is why it happens. Ask it flat: is any of this already live somewhere else, and who else has it? A studio that owns its work answers in one sentence.

Ask who is actually going to do it

The people in the pitch and the people on the work are frequently not the same people. Ask for names. Ask what else those names are on this quarter. Ask what happens to your project when one of them leaves.

Ask what you get on the last day

A lot of studios are built to deliver a beautiful file and go. Is it the files, the system, the reasoning and the edge cases — or a folder, an invoice and a goodbye? Ask before you sign, not in week nine.

Ask them to disagree with you

In the pitch. Say the thing you are most certain about and watch whether anybody pushes on it. If nobody does, you are buying execution — which is a real thing to buy, and you should pay execution prices for it. Where we stand on that →

Ask how they price a change of mind

You will change your mind. Everybody does, usually for good reasons. A partner who has never thought about how that gets handled has either not shipped much, or is quietly counting on the change order.

Look for the engagement that came back

Anyone can sell a one-off. A client who returned — twice, on something harder — is the one external signal that survives contact with reality. It is the measure we use on ourselves →

Filed under things we walked into

A client came to us after a large agency had facelifted their site. It was decent work. It was also, almost line for line, a site that agency had already built and sold to a different client. Ours had paid many thousands of dollars for it and had no idea they were the second owner.

They sold you the same car everyone else has. Different colour, and the seats went from cloth to leather.

It is more common than anyone admits, and it is a margin decision rather than a design one — the second sale costs almost nothing to produce. It is also the easiest thing on this page to check before you sign, and nearly nobody checks.

None of this is a trap. A good studio will enjoy these questions, because they are the ones it has already answered internally.

Working with creatives

Say it’s beautiful and we’ll ask you why.

Beautiful aesthetic?Beautiful interaction?Beautiful colour?Beautiful system?Beautiful how?

Not to be difficult. “I love it” and “I hate it” are the same kind of feedback — a feeling with the cause left off, which means the next round is a guess. The reason underneath is the usable part, and it is almost always one sentence. “Make it pop” costs a week. “This doesn’t feel trustworthy enough for a payment screen” costs the same breath and saves it.

Most of the waste in a design engagement is not in the design. It is in the loop around it — the reviews, the relays, the week spent guessing at what somebody meant. That part is fixable, and mostly on the first day.

Bring the problem, not the solution

Arrive with the screen already drawn and you have paid for a designer and hired a draughtsman. Bring the thing that is not working and the constraint you cannot move. We would much rather argue about that.

One decider

Five stakeholders with equal veto is not a review, it is an auction. Gather every opinion in the building — then have one person weigh them and be able to say yes and mean it.

A late no costs twenty times an early one

Say the hard thing in week two while it is still a conversation, not in week nine when it is a rebuild. We would honestly rather be told we are wrong early — that is the entire reason we work in clickable screens instead of flat comps. Fail early, fail often, fail in private →

React to the work, not the person

And we will do the same about your brief. What is on the wall is nobody’s identity. The sooner a room gets comfortable with that, the sooner the room gets good.

The person who disagrees with you is earning their fee

Agreement is the cheapest thing a studio sells and the least useful thing you can buy. The pushback is the part you are paying for.

What the FAQ?

Questions worth getting out of the way early.

These are the ones that actually come up — in first calls, in kickoffs, and occasionally in week nine when it would have been cheaper in week one.

What will it cost, and how long will it take?

The rate, we can tell you now — it is on the pricing page. The total, we cannot, and neither can anyone who hands you one in the first meeting; we scope it after the question week, when a number stops being a guess. If a figure on day one is what you need, somebody will give you one. It will be fiction. There is a story about this →

Can you show us what your work did for revenue?

Not as a number we would stand behind, and we would be careful with anyone who offers one without the context. We were never the only people in the room — the client shipped it, sold it, marketed it and ran it. What we watch is quieter: did someone finish the task, did the spot where people kept getting stuck stop being one. And our measure of ourselves is whether clients come back, and they do. If you want the figures and the context around them, ask, and we will walk you through them properly: video call, your office, or a coffee shop. On measurement →

What do you actually need from us?

Less than you think, and non-negotiably three things: one decider, access to the people who will use the thing, and the constraint you have not written down yet — the deadline behind the deadline, the exec who hates blue, the system nobody is allowed to touch. That one surfaces in week nine if it does not surface in week one.

We already have a spec. Can you just build it?

Yes. We will want to argue with it for a day first. A spec is a stack of decisions and some of them were made for reasons that have since expired. If it holds up, you have lost a day and gained a partner who knows why it is right.

Can you just do the UI?

We can, and sometimes that is exactly the right scope. Know what you are buying: visual craft on a structure we did not get to question. If the structure is sound, it is good value. If it is not, the most beautiful version of a confusing flow is still a confusing flow.

Will any of this get resold to somebody else?

No. What we make for you is yours — the thinking, the system, the files. We bring our methods to the next engagement because that is what methods are for. We do not bring your product. Ask every studio you talk to this question →

Who is going to be doing the work?

The people you meet. We are small on purpose and that is the trade — you cannot hand us twelve workstreams at once, and you also never get the B team, because there is not one.

What happens when you leave?

You get the files, the system and the reasoning — and if we did it right, a team that already knows how the work is done, because we made a point of showing them. If you would rather we kept the seat, that works too. How we think about leaving →

Are you using AI on our project?

On the parts that are machine work, yes — it is why working screens arrive in days instead of weeks. Not on the thinking, and nothing gets to you straight off the conveyor. Our position on it →

When should we not hire you?

When you want the thing you already decided, drawn nicely and fast — good shops do that and they are cheaper. When nobody internally can make a decision. And when you need forty people on it by Monday. What we send elsewhere →

Do we have to be in Portland?

No. The work has run from Portland to New York, up to Calgary and across to Lisbon, and most of it was never local. If you need us in the room, we will get on a plane — we have crossed the country for a working session more than once and would do it again tomorrow. Where the work has been →

Where this came from

None of it is theory. All of it cost somebody something.

Some of these were problems already in the building when we arrived — filed under things nobody mentioned in the kickoff. Some we learned the hard way, halfway through, at our own expense. We have been keeping notes for fourteen years. This page is the part that generalises.

Ask us the ones that aren’t here