Studio Missive 22: Reflecting on 2025

Hi friends,

Happy Friday! Especially a happy Friday to you if this is your last working day of the year.

What’s inspiring you?

1. Niko Kitsakis wrote a thoughtful treatise about the importance of beauty, which was one of the more meaningful essays about our craft I read recently. 
2. No sooner than I sent last week’s missive about my YouTube strategy did I discover Life of Riza, which is far and away the best YouTube channel I’ve found all year. She’s using the camera to actually tell stories, and her process literally starts with a script and a storyboard. (Her next video is going to be about how she does it, and I can’t wait.) This was the first video I saw from her.. I don’t relate at all to her life stage — I turn 35 this weekend and somebody sharing lessons they’ve learned in their twenties isn’t that interesting to me — but the cinematography is next level.
3. John Amditis’s article for Nieman Lab, ​“Please learn how to use your computer,” made me laugh. But check out the design for Nieman Lab’s 2026 predictions: a stack of interactive journalism notebooks. A delightful idea and brilliantly executed. 
4. Pentagram’s new branding for Super Peach is fun. The illustrations, which are reminiscent of Japanese calligraphy, are delightful.
5. Emil Kowalski’s post about clip-path came in clutch while I was working on a client project this week. I’m sure I’ll need to refer to it again, and honestly thought I already did, and couldn’t find it in my archives. (As an aside, I think Emil is one of the greatest design engineers in the field today. Really thoughtful work. His post earlier in the year, ​“You don’t need animations”, was thought provoking.)
6. Dave Brubeck is one of my favourite jazz musicians of all time (I have a canonized mental list), and I found out he has a Christmas record last weekend. Completely delightful.

What are you working on this week?

What a week. It’s been filled with meetings and a lot of heads-down work. I don’t have anything profound to say, and I imagine the week has been the same as yours: a lot of work to end the year on a high note, and prepare to start the next one well.

2025 was a good year for my studio. It wasn’t my best year financially, but it was still a very good year, and it was nobody’s best year financially. Judging a year by its financial return is for jerks, though, and there are many things I’m grateful for this year.

Primarily, this was a great year for rediscovering some sort of spark within myself. After a couple rough years during COVID, it feels like I’ve discovered some sort of hunger again. I want to do excellent work, but I also want to challenge myself as a designer. 

When I started freelancing, my sole goal was to tell stories. Design seemed like a great way to do it. So did photography and writing. I tried a bunch of things, but in the past few years, I’ve really focused on design and front-end development.

That was a great strategy when times were good, and everybody was paying for great design or development. In poor times, I think a better strategy is to be as diverse as possible. It’s easier to sell one service if you can bundle it with another. 

All that to say that, this year, I’ve felt a pull back to telling stories in a broader sense. I think, in the wake of AI and the destruction of our politic, it’s more important than ever to tell stories and share in our humanity. When they take everything else, all that’s left is who we are and how we treat each other. 

Our compassion is rooted in our way of seeing. Sometimes, those of us who work in visual arts are called to have a good eye, and use it to show others the beauty left in the world.

I think that’s maybe a good goal for 2026.

In the meantime, a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and Winter Solstice to you. And a happy new year! And if you celebrate none of those, I hope you get some time to enjoy a holiday regardless. And as always, thank you for reading.

The studio will be open again on Monday, January 5^th. See you in the new year.

Nathan