What 2022 Taught Our Studio

Every December, Kate and I sit down and write an honest letter about the year, first for ourselves, then a version for the studio, and now, apparently, a version for the internet. The discipline matters more than the audience. A studio that cannot describe its own year accurately will not direct its next one deliberately.

So, for the record: 2022 was the year the weather changed, and the year we found out what this studio is made of.

The year the froth left

We opened this studio into the tail end of a boom. Budgets were expansive, timelines forgiving, and, if we are honest, some of the industry's confidence was borrowed from cheap capital rather than earned by work. This year the loans were called in. Hiring freezes rippled through our clients, "efficiency" entered every brief, and we watched the tech and creative industries hold their breath together.

Here is what surprised me: the work got better. Not despite the constraint, because of it. Nervous budgets do not tolerate vague strategy or decorative deliverables, and the pressure burned away everything performative. The projects we shipped this year, the Møller identity, the Northwind commerce rebuild and holiday campaign, the film work Ruben's team pulled off on budgets that would have been laughed at in 2021, are the strongest in our short history. Scarcity, it turns out, is a brutal but effective creative director.

What the chaos taught us

The year also supplied a rolling seminar in dependency. Figma, the tool our entire design practice lives in, agreed to be acquired by the company it was built to escape. Twitter demonstrated in real time what it means to build on rented land when the landlord changes. Attribution kept degrading, analytics platforms forced migrations, and every framework we use announced its own reinvention.

The common lesson, and we have repeated it in different registers all year: own what you can, and hold the rest loosely. Owned audiences over rented reach. Portable process over proprietary magic. Judgment in people over features in tools. None of this was new wisdom. 2022 just charged tuition for it.

What we got wrong

An honest letter includes this section. We scoped discovery too thin on one engagement early in the year and paid for it across three months of rework, which is what finally made us restructure how we price and plan. We were slow to formalize mentorship in a hybrid studio and watched two junior designers grow slower than they deserved before we fixed the structure. And we said yes in February to a project our gut had already declined. The work shipped fine. Fine is the problem. Every hour spent on fine is an hour taken from good.

What we are carrying into 2023

Three commitments, written down where clients and staff can hold us to them:

• Fewer, deeper. We will take on less concurrent work next year, on purpose, in a down market. This is either conviction or foolishness, and we think years of referrals prove which.
• Craft as the moat. Whatever next year's tools and platforms do, and the pace of change is clearly accelerating, the studios that survive commoditization will be the ones whose judgment cannot be templated. We intend to be one of them.
• Keep the letter honest. The temptation as a studio grows is to start believing your own case studies. The annual discipline of writing down what actually happened, including this section, is the antidote we know.

To our clients, collaborators, and the twelve people who make this place what it is: thank you for a year that asked hard questions and mostly got good answers. See you in January. The kerning still matters.