Content
What we publish: essays on how we design and how we work, written for anyone who runs a business and wonders why things are done the way they are, and the case studies that show it.
How we work ·
Don’t wait months to see it work
You shouldn’t have to buy a plan before you’ve seen anything work. We build a small piece of the real thing, show it to you working on a date agreed at the start, and you decide what happens next.
Read →Method ·
Canonical Presence
Every business is described in a dozen places, and most of them are out of date. This piece explains why that isn’t a new problem, why an artist feels it the way a winery does, and how one record on your own website keeps them all telling the truth.
Read →How we build ·
Your worst hire is the user experience
A team’s work is only as good as the person who understands its character least. We wrote our character, our positioning and our identity as code, so that person ships on-brand work too. Here is each piece working, what we measure, and where it doesn’t work yet.
Read →Case study ·
A website that sells the way an artist does
The artist Sara Paula Hoffman kept her prices, galleries and archive in separate places. We brought them into one catalog. Now every priced work shows how its price was reached, and offers go straight to her studio. A work hanging in a show sends buyers to that gallery. Each morning, a check tells her if a gallery has sold a work or changed its price.
Read →Speaking of reputation ·
Before you pay for a logo
If you’ve been quoted for a logo and brand guidelines, three questions are worth answering first: who the company is, who the guidelines will guide, and what you’ll promise. We share a $300 job of ours where we skipped them.
Read →How we design ·
A study of our type
Every piece of type on goodcitizens.us, set live and explained: the three typefaces and why we chose them, the one golden-ratio scale every size comes from, the rule that sets the space between lines, and the reason behind each setting.
Read →How we design ·
Everyone’s a critic
A usability score from a panel of experts sounds like science. The evidence says experts rarely agree, and the certificate that makes someone an expert is a receipt for one company’s courses. We trust that expertise without testing it, when the work itself can be checked.
Read →How we build ·
Build it, own it, license it
AI made code cheap to write, and the accountants now say what it takes for that spending to become an asset. Whether it lasts is a question of quality, and a small business that builds well can own what it builds, and license it.
Read →How we design ·
The golden ratio, without the legends
Most of what people say about the golden ratio is legend. The true story is stranger and better: a cut Euclid needed for a pentagon, a name invented in the 1700s, sunflowers, crystals that could not exist, and why we build our pages on it anyway.
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