Studio Missive 28: Phase 2 of Bruce Mayhew’s website
Hi friends,
Happy Friday! I didn’t get a chance to send the missive last week; some emergencies at the house occupied too much time and space and ate into work. (Related: water is the enemy of the home.) So this week, there’s a lot to share. Let’s dive in. (No pun intended.)
What’s inspiring you?
- CSS is making selects way better. Nice Select gives a great overview of the possibilities. I can’t wait until this is commonly abailable enough to use without fallbacks. (Looking at you, Safari.)
- The new branding for Kanal by Base Design is so cool, particularly in the way it uses one extremely variable typeface, and the single font seemingly morphs into multiple forms. BP&O has a couple great examples of how it works, and I think their videos outshine Base Design’s own presentation.
- In 2024, designer Cabel Sasser gave an incredibly inspiring talk about “the Sistine chapel of McDonald’s wall art,” and the man who painted it. Last week, Cabel shared the behind the scenes story of how the talk happened. Go watch the talk and read this post. There’s something special, and humbling, in celebrating one person’s very small contribution to our shared culture. I think it reminds us all that we only need to really touch one person. That’s the job of being a human: if we help, inspire, or change one person, we have moved a thousand.
- In the last missive, I shared Terry Godier’s post asking why every RSS reader looks like an email inbox. Terry released his own RSS app that atttempts to solve the design problem in a new way. It’s called Current. Instead of treating your curated feed reader into an inbox, Current turns it into a river. Really neat design thinking and an atypical solution to a problem.
- A friend sent me the portfolio for Collins, which is a massive agency that I somehow wasn’t familiar with. (The rock I live under is pretty big, and yes, it’s nice in here, thanks for asking.) What I love about the Collins site is the way they break down their services into programs. I wish I came up with it. It’s so smart.
What are you working on this week?
Phase two of Bruce Mayhew’s website is now up (see the information for the initial launch). This includes a new page for his book, including a couple photographs I took, a revised contact page, and a new design for his mission, vision, and values page.
It’s early days, but I’m pleased with how Bruce’s launch has gone. We launched at the end of January, and YOY, visitors are already up over 90%. If that number seems outrageous, this is a 40% improvement over January. Already, the site is seeing a 20% increase in engagement. It’s still too early to say how well it’s going definitively, but I’m pleased with early progress.
This week, I’ve also been working on the new landing pages for this site. I’ve been writing and rewriting them, and thinking carefully about the future of agencies in an AI-driven world (for better and for worse). I finished what I hope is the final draft of the home page today, and want to work on a few sector pages and polish them up in the next couple weeks so I can begin designing and building them.
My working theory at the moment is that AI, whether you like it or not, is likely going to subsume work where merit comes primarily from execution. In other words, if your reputation is that you do it when other people fail to — which is largely what I built my reputation on — then AI will eat you. This is largely because AI doesn’t need to sleep and can work faster than you, so if your value comes from execution, the robots can out-execute your work.
The only real option, from my perspective, is to shift upstream. If you want to succeed in a world where execution isn’t enough, you must offer something more.
I think I have the receipts to prove my strategic value, but I don’t lean myself into that positioning at all right now. That’s my goal for the coming months. Truth be told, AI is all so new and is developing so fast, I don’t know if this is the right long-term play. It’s the horse I’m betting on for now.
I hope I can share all that work with you soon.
Until next week,
Nathan