Studio Missive 31: Back to the drawing board

Hi friend,

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening at the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

1. “Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6.” Don Knuth, computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford, wrote about Claude solving his own research problem. I can’t say I fully understand the math, or even mostly understand, but I thought this was extremely relatable: ​“Filip told me that the explorations reported above, though ultimately successful, weren’t really smooth. He had to do some restarts when Claude stopped on random errors; then some of the previous search results were lost. After every two or three test programs were run, he had to remind Claude again and again that it was supposed to document its progress carefully.” I am blown away at these LLM tools as research companions, and also befuddled when they behave exactly as Filip described.
2. A couple weeks ago, I shared a cool way to make minimalistic city maps. The website I linked to never worked, but somebody turned the open source code into a reliable app. It works for any longitude and latitude in the world, and it’s great for printing out a map.
3. Love The Studioworks Library, a free resource of practical tools and articles for freelancers and creative studios from (who else) Jessica Hische. Do your bookkeeping without Quickbooks! Figure out what a project is going to cost! Understand your hourly rate! The amount of stress this would have saved me fifteen years ago cannot be overstated.
4. I started reading about z-index and assumed I knew how to use it well. But I didn’t expect CSS tokens in my z-index.

What are you working on?

I don’t have much visual work to share this week. It’s just been heads down, focus-on-the-work go time. The strategy I shared last week was unanimously approved by the committee I report to. I’m now working on stylescapes. For other clients, we’re in the midst of strategically defining their next projects, and working together to write good, defensible briefs.

Outside of that, it’s just been the normal business of running a studio. My NAS somehow filled up with space — recording video footage will do that to you — and I had to order hard drives to fill it. This is the worst time in the world to buy hard drives, by the way; the cost is double what it was when I first bought the NAS. And, read this in your best TV announcer voice: 🦄 quantities are limited 💀, so you can only buy one hard drive at a time. So they’ve got you coming and going. It’s so dumb, but it’s been a process just to replace a few hard drives. (Remember when computers were fun? I’m old enough to remember when computers were fun. Oh, they’re still fun? I’m just old and curmudgeonly? Well, never mind. And way to be a jerk.)

I wrote two weeks ago about my own rebrand, but have already started redesigning everything I shared then. After sleeping on it for a couple nights, it was obvious that the design direction I walked down was a polished version of nothing in particular. Polish is good, but it felt to me like the cobbler’s children with no shoes. So back to the drawing board. More to come there in the future. I have set an internal deadline of May 4 to design the new website, which seems simultaneously a million years away and also tomorrow.

In the meantime, spring is finally arriving, and I can’t wait to bask in the glory of the sun’s rays on my patio.

Until next time,

Nathan

P.S. I’m over the burger CEOs.