Studio Missive 16: 2025 is all booked up!

Hi friends,

Happy Friday! Lots on the docket let’s week. Let’s dig in.

What’s inspiring you?

1. Jesús Olano wrote about interactive typography, and I think my brain exploded right around the time he introduced fluid type sizes in CSS functions. CSS is basically a full-blown programming language now.
2. Zoo branding is becoming a theme in these missives. That’s not intentional, but I will admit I am not surprised that zoos are a hotbed of creative potential. I love the new brand identity for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance by Pentagram. By uniting old adventure badges, bold colours, silhouetted animal shapes, and negative space, Pentagram has designed something that looks modern, vintage, and entirely obvious — what else could it possibly be, if not this? (Via Grilli Type’s obviously excited blog post about Pentagram using GT Ultra for the work.)
3. On the topic of Grill Type, Something Else used GT America, a lovely typeface, for their brand identity and website for Metric Coffee. Their case study is lovely, and Metric’s website is also excellent. (I am still looking for a project where I can justify using GT Standard, which has one of the best typography minisites I have ever seen.)
4. I loved the takeaways Austin Kleon wrote after his conversation with Priya Parker about the art of messing around. I particularly resonated with the brief interview featuring Tyler the Creator: ​“Create like a child, edit like a scientist.”
5. I uploaded a photo for the first time in years to Instagram, and immediately felt gross about it. I’d much prefer to upload photos to my personal site, and I started immediately brainstorming about all the ways one could do this, and all the potential layouts. Funny enough, designer Al Abut was thinking about the same thing and curated a few ideas. Of course, I’m now certain there’s a way to combine individual photo posts, gallery walls, albums, and series just by using some clever metadata in a CMS. So excuse me while I dramatically overthink this.
6. “When you cut something out, what do you replace it with?” The How to Be a Better Human podcast (from TED) made a video about Edith Zimmerman’s sobriety. I was particularly inspired by one small note Chris made: the habits Edith replaced drinking with weren’t just better for her. They made her feel better about who she is as a person. (Via Kottke.)
7. Friend of the studio Vale (Declan Chidlow) wrote a great article for Piccalilli demoing some view transition examples. Animate your page transitions with turning your website into a SPA! It turns out, and I somehow missed this, that the View Transition API easily adds animation between multiple states with on-page elements as well. This new CSS is complete magic (it reminds me a bit of the old jQuery animations from back in the day), and there’s a lot of potential here I’m still wrapping my head around. (I have several things I’d like to build into my portfolio over the next few months, and I’d love to experiment with it then.)

What are you working on this week?

It’s kind of bananas. I updated my Contact page and noted I am now fully booked until 2026. 2026! One super cool potential project fell through (bummer), but my church asked if I could help them with a new brand identity and website, and, well, I suddenly have some time. It made sense to put it to use.

As far as new business goes, 2025 has been a slow year for me. I have had lots of existing clients continue their relationships with me, and I’m thankful for them and the steady stream of projects they send my way. So my business is all good. Everything is hunky dory. But the side effects of the current American administration have had huge ripple effects on American and Canadian business investments. It’s like you can feel everyone taking deep breaths and tightening their belts.

Look, I’m not in a position to complain. Like I said, my business is great. And I only have capacity for one or two projects as of January anyway, so I’m already more than half booked up. I’m just fascinated by the macro economics of our current geopolitical landscape. A couple years ago, I was booked out six months all the time. Now, I’ve got free time.

As far as the church project goes, I’m still writing out the whole project plan and figuring out what’s going to happen when. I’d love to do some BTS videos on this as I do the work. I published my second YouTube video this week (you can read the brief blog post about it if you like), and I’m having a blast making this stuff. Like I did in the first video, I reviewed website submissions from real business owners. But after two of those, it’s time to try a different topic. I don’t know what that’s going to be yet, or when I’m going to film it. I’m still so new to this that these videos take me forever to make, so I’m mostly excited to catch up on sleep this weekend. We’ll see if there’s another ready for next week.

Until then,

Nathan

P.S. If you or somebody you know somebody who wants a new website in 2026, I still wouldn’t wait too long to book it. You never know what could happen.