Twelve years of Wildfire Studios (and a Q & A)

Today is the twelfth anniversary of Wildfire Studios! This year is also my fourteenth anniversary of freelancing (which, if my admittedly hazy memory serves, I also started doing around this time of year, but it might have been July).

All that to say I’m entering my fifteenth year of business. It didn’t start with design work, but it only took a couple years to end up here. Everything since has practically been a blur.

I thought it would be fun to do a retrospective Q&A, so I asked folks on social media and some friends and family if they had any questions for me. Twelve years is a long time in the web world! Fourteen years is even longer. It feels appropriate at this point to acknowledge the moment. (But only briefly. There’s work to do.)

Here are the questions people asked:

What made you decide to brand your studio separately from yourself?

At the time, I had a few reasons. In my first two years of freelancing, I did a lot of writing (for AppStorm when it existed, Jim Dalrymple at The Loop, national TV campaigns, and a whole lot more). I had also tried my hand at wedding photography (I lasted two years). But graphic design, digital design, and web development were sticking for me. The work was fun, and people kept asking if I could do it.

I felt green at the time, and I think naming the studio helped me feel like it was a ​“real” thing. It also gave it an air of legitimacy I wasn’t sure I’d earned while operating under my own name. And at the time I had the inklings of doing something like what Dan Mall did with SuperFriendly: a big agency of remote workers who worked together on projects of all sizes, but weren’t tied together via a salary. So it seemed natural to name the business.

In more recent years, it’s become much more fashionable just to operate under your own name, but that was rarer then — at least in my area.

How has the industry changed in the past 12 years?

When I started making websites professionally, display:flex was a new thing. We were still relying on floats for layouts. Responsive web design was becoming a thing for the first time. HTML5 and CSS3 had caught up to the dreams of those of us who wished web design could be more like print design. In fact, the realization of that dream was why I started doing web design work. Everything felt possible. I was optimistic.

The web continues to improve, but a lot has changed in the intervening years. In 2012, I remember Mule had a tagline on their website that said ​“Last of the independents.” Twitter and Facebook were consuming web agencies wholesale at the time, and it seemed like the era of the 100-person web shop was ending. Teehan & Lax joined Facebook in early 2015. I was living in Toronto at the time, and that felt like the final nail in the coffin of that world. Big agencies were dead.

I’ve never hired anybody. For a long time, people used to think that was odd. There were several years where I had to quote Paul Jarvis’s Company of One to people, and explain that the agency model was collapsing. 

Until one day, people just stopped asking. Nobody has asked me when I plan to hire people since 2018.

To me, that’s been the biggest change over the past fifteen years or so. I know there are many remaining agencies, but as a model, I feel like it’s less popular and less reliable than ever.

How does your writing background complement your development endeavours?

I don’t think anybody has asked me this directly before! Thanks Vale. You’re going to get a long answer, because I’ve had no experience distilling my thoughts on this into a shorter one.

I went to school for Professional Writing and Semiotics at the University of Waterloo. I don’t know if this is still true, but when I went to university, Waterloo was the only school in Canada that offered an education in semiotics.

By the time I graduated high school, I was an award-winning playwright. So I thought I’d write plays or movies, and that would be my university education. I could not have been more wrong. The primary focus of my education was semiotics, or symbols: everything from how signage works to the way advertising, capitalism, and power centralize to get citizens to behave a certain way. I studied everything from feminism to the visual language of films. I even took a couple courses on how music can change and shape our perception of things.

It was a lot of critical thinking. There were semesters where the only assignment was to challenge an idea in a final term paper, which determined 90% of your grade (the other 10% was attendance).

For a variety of reasons, I very nearly didn’t get my degree. (Blame a nine-month bender and a seeming inability to learn a second language, a requirement I always found odd for an English degree.) Getting my degree took five years. My fourth year was filled with a lot of failing grades. I nearly flunked my advertising class while I was writing television commercials by night. (My professor found this very alarming, and concluded after a long discussion that school just wasn’t for me, and I should make my very best efforts to get my degree and otherwise keep doing what I was doing.)

That’s a very long way of saying I was in an environment that taught me critical thinking for five years. During that time, I had a lot of support from my professors, a kind guidance counsellor who got me through, and a dean who took my long-term concerns about the program seriously. I was systematically taught that critical thinking and logical reasoning could open and change minds.

I think critical thinking and reasoning are probably the strongest skills any developer could bring to the table. (And probably the strongest skills any designer could bring to the table too, which explains a lot.)

Which skill or app has served you best? What skill or app do you wish you could go back and learn at the start of your career?

I think any good designer is naturally curious and a strong critical thinker (see above). But those are more mindsets than they are skills. 

To be honest, I don’t think my business would exist today if I didn’t have the particular set of social skills that I possess. It’s not that I am the most elegant in the room, or the most likeable. In fact, people so often find me grizzly that it’s a running joke they’re shocked my extroverted, bubbly wife ever married me. 

But I am blessed to be good at three things particularly suited for business owners. I have the wherewithal to listen when I need to. I can explain complicated technical problems in ways that everybody else can comprehend. And when something is important, I am not afraid to argue with decision makers, CEOs, and other important people. Some people have found these particular personality traits to be abrasive, including members of my own family, but I think they’re why my business has survived and thrived for as long as it has.

As far as what I wish I could go back and learn at the start of my career: I wish I was better at more functional programming languages. I am good at front-end web stuff, but a deeper knowledge of reactive Javascript, C++, Swift, and even Java would have opened a lot of doors for me.

Did you think you’d be doing what you’re doing now twelve years ago when you started?

I am not sure I thought more than two weeks ahead twelve years ago. I thought about how long my business would last, but I still often catch myself thinking, ​“I should buy that thing for the office next month, if I still have any clients left.” (I literally had that thought this afternoon.)

I didn’t think I’d be in this racket this long. I’m not complaining.

Do you have any dream projects?

I would love to make a website for a guitar company. Somebody like Gibson or Paul Reed Smith. I have a wall of guitars in my office. My friends make fun of me for how many I have. When I reconnect with old clients, they often ask if the guitars they saw behind me on Zoom calls are still multiplying.

So I’d love to work with other people passionate about the instrument.

Describe a typical working day.

I don’t think it’s that interesting, but: I more or less never leave the house. I wake up, check email to make sure nobody’s servers are on fire (I have literally had servers on fire), work out, and then I just work most of the day in my studio, which is in the basement. I have client calls over Zoom most days. I meet with every client I have once a week to show them progress on their projects and make sure things are on track. I think clients like it.

Sometimes, I mix it up a little bit. I might take some time to write and record some music. I’ve got some decent audio equipment in the studio that makes side projects like making guitar backing tracks possible. Making something just for me sometimes helps me think more clearly about client work.

Are you worried that AI will take your job away?

I think there will always be jobs for people who want to make things for other humans. I’ve always found it inspiring when Jony Ive talks about how good design is a gift for humanity. I think that’s true. I don’t think AI is capable of making ​“gifts for humanity.” 

But nobody knows, least of all me. For all we know, AI is another bubble that will pop. Or just a tool that we use for complex research that search engines would struggle with. But maybe it will take away all our jobs, and we as a society will need to figure out Universal Basic Income very quickly.

Ask me again in twelve more years, assuming we’re all still here and we haven’t been killed by nuclear war, the heat death of the universe, or terminators.

What was the biggest obstacle or problem you had to overcome in your career thus far? Any learnings or things you wish you knew 14 years ago?

When I started, I was focused on just surviving. I made better money than I should have, but probably not as much as I would have in a typical white-collar job, at least for the first couple years. Money was tight. My wife and I got married ten years ago, and then she promptly lost her job and simultaneously needed her wisdom teeth removed. That was a tough summer, at least financially.

Making enough money to survive was hard until it wasn’t anymore. (Thankfully. Knock on wood. Thank God. Etc.)

Today, I struggle the most with the fear of repeating myself. I have an innate desire to reinvent every wheel I encounter. I don’t know if this is to avoid boredom, or if it’s because doing the same thing over and over again would make me feel like a fraud. 

But it’s the classic artist’s dilemma. If Metallica could have gotten over their constant need to reinvent themselves, they would never have made all the garbage they made after 1991. But they would have been bored, and we would have been bored too. So there’s a line to find there. (And some of us are better at reinvention than others. David Bowie was a genius.)

What project do you still think about?

I made the website for The New Quarterly in 2016, and they have of course redesigned it since — it’s been nine years! — but I regularly think about how proud I am to have done that work. The New Quarterly is a Canadian literary magazine that has been around for more than half a century. At the time, they had over 150 printed issues of poetry, short stories, and essays. I helped get all that online and available to read, with a very generous pricing model that made older issues freely available. 

I spent a lot of time making that site as accessible as possible. For the first time, people who were hard of sight could experience this art and this part of our shared cultural history. It was an honour and a tremendous gift to be a part of that. I designed and built the entire thing in only four months. (They were, for a time, my only client. Like I said, things were lean.)

Thank you to all the folks who asked questions. (I’m just glad I didn’t have to make any up.) And thanks to anybody who has supported me over the years. To run a business for more than five years is to persevere through trial and to not know any better. To run it for more than ten is a gift and a blessing.