The room is a tool
Nobody audits the studio itself. The walls, the default screens, the seating — the room is making decisions all day, mostly unsupervised.
Our Journals
Strategy, craft, and a few articles we just felt like writing. From our founder, team, and a few friends.
176 Articles
Brands act from identity
The brands that never seem to agonize over what to post aren't more decisive. They've answered a different question entirely.
Reps with feedback
Ten years of experience or one year repeated ten times. The difference isn't talent or hours. It's whether anything pushed back.
The OODA loop for creative teams
A fighter pilot's four-word diagram explains more about agency work than most marketing books. The team that learns faster wins, even outgunned.
Ask for the counterargument
Everyone in the room loved the concept. That should have been the first warning sign, not the finish line.
Colony Presents: The Arcade (now with a wizard…)
So, we built an arcade. It started as a personal project for us and the best parts were never planned.
There is no box
Most of the constraints in a rebrand brief were never decided. They accumulated. An exercise in finding out which walls are load-bearing.
The misogi project
One project a year with a real chance of failure, chosen on purpose. Notes on borrowing a ritual we found in a…
Antifragile brands
Some brands survive a rough quarter. A rarer kind comes out of it sharper than they went in. The difference isn't luck,…
Earn the right to scale
Scale is a multiplier, and multipliers don't care what they multiply. Prove it small first, because whatever's broken is coming with you.
The lava lamps guarding the internet
A real slice of the web's encryption is seeded by a wall of lava lamps in a San Francisco lobby. It isn't…
When the number becomes the goal
Nobody on your team is cheating. They're doing exactly what the dashboard asked. That's the problem Goodhart saw coming fifty years ago.