Studio Missive #6
Hi friend! This has been a good week for me. I’m excited to share what’s happening around the studio.
What’s inspiring you?
- Legendary designer Joe Caroff passed away, and left behind a tremendous body of work, including the James Bond logo. He made a lot of popular movie posters, and never got stuck in just one style.
- CSS just keeps getting better. As of Chrome 140+, you can now animate “current section” links (called “scrollspy”) with just CSS.
- If you have young kids, or young nieces or nephews, or grandchildren, or if you’ve so much as seen a child in the past five years, you’ve probably heard of Bluey, universally agreed upon as one of the best children’s shows ever made. It’s Nice That wrote an article about the creation of the show’s style with Bluey’s art director, Catriona Drummond.
- The agency Stocks Taylor Benson stopped entering design awards to spend more time doing meaningful pro bono work. (I have never entered any design awards. I think clients would rather see me working for them than working for pats on the back.)
- Analogue designed a really cool identity for a Japanese gin. BP&O published a great analysis of the work. This is really striking work.
What are you working on?
Yesterday, my indie design and dev shop turned twelve years old. In total, I’ve been freelancing for fourteen years. I asked some folks on social media and some friends and family if they had any retrospective questions for me, and shared my answers in a blog post. I think it’s wild I’m still doing this for a living. I’m very grateful. I’ll tell you one thing: I’m as surprised as anyone that I’m still making a living at this. I’m also a little afraid that if went away, I’m so use to running the show that I would be completely unhireable at this point.
So fingers crossed that this keeps up for many more years.
Last week, I shared that a client was about to launch a product I’ve designed. The launch happened, and from what I hear, it went well, but I’ve been asked not to share the product yet while they fix a few server-side things. The client’s the boss! I’ll keep you posted on this one.
Until next time,
Nathan