Journal

Notes from inside the work.

What we have changed our minds about, what a project actually cost, and the arguments we keep having. Written by whoever did the work, not by a marketing team.

A printed wireframe grid on bone paper with a black fineliner across it Process January 2026 6 min read The six-week rule, and what it cost us to learn it We spent eleven months on a project that should have taken two. The fix was not better estimation — it was refusing to quote anything longer than six weeks. Read entry A bone plaster wall covered in pinned index cards and printed interface screens Strategy December 2025 5 min read Scope is the design By the time you are choosing typefaces, every important decision has already been made. Here is where they actually get made, and who should be in the room. Read entry Two people talking across a pale oak meeting table Case study November 2025 7 min read What we learned rebuilding Halcyon Four views of the same data, none of them good. Ten weeks later there was one, and activation went up 38%. A note on why removing features is so hard to sell. Read entry Stacked brand guideline booklets and paper swatches on bone linen Brand October 2025 5 min read A brand your team can actually use Most identity work is delivered as a PDF nobody opens twice. The test of a brand system is whether a non-designer can apply it correctly on a Friday afternoon. Read entry A laptop and notebook on a bare oak desk in hard afternoon light Process September 2025 4 min read Why we stopped writing specifications We wrote them for a year. Then we noticed we had stopped reading them. What replaced them was one page and a deployed URL every Friday. Read entry

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We write when there is something worth writing about.

Roughly one entry a month, always about a real project. No newsletter, no sequence, no lead magnet — just the journal and an RSS-shaped promise to keep it honest.

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