So, a journal
The first entry. Why an agency that builds brands for other people is finally writing things down for itself.
We build brands for a living, which means we spend a surprising amount of time convincing other people to write things down. Their point of view. The reasons behind their decisions. All the sharp things they say in meetings that somehow never survive the trip to their own website. At some point it occurred to us that we’ve never once taken this advice ourselves.
So, a journal.
The idea has been sitting in a drawer for a while now. Fourteen years, give or take, if we’re counting from the very beginning: long enough to accumulate the kind of opinions that only come from shipping real work and watching some of it succeed and some of it teach us things. The drawer got full.
Here’s what this isn’t. It isn’t a content strategy. There’s no editorial calendar taped to the wall, no keyword list, no plan to publish every Tuesday at nine whether we have a thought or not. We’ve watched that kind of schedule hollow out plenty of decent writing, and we’d rather go quiet for a month than post filler with a stock photo on top.
It also isn’t a manifesto. Manifestos are what you write when you want to sound like you have convictions.
A journal is where you find out whether you actually do, and we’d rather find out.
The plan, such as it is: write when one of us has something worth saying, stop when we don’t. Some entries will be about craft. Others will be about the strange business of doing creative work for money without losing your taste. A few will probably be about nothing much at all, which we hear is allowed in a journal.
We went back and forth on the name, for what it’s worth. Insights was never in the running; that word has been thoroughly ruined by a decade of gated PDFs. Journal felt right because journals are allowed to wander, and because nobody in history has ever been sold anything by a journal.
Expect opinions. This long in the business leaves you holding a stack of them, and holding them back in work that’s mostly judgment always struck us as a strange kind of modesty. We’ll try to make sure the ones we publish here are earned.
Who’s it for? Mostly us, if we’re honest. Writing is how you find out what you actually think, and thinking in public keeps you honest in a way that thinking in a pitch deck never will. If someone else finds any of it useful, we’ll take that as a bonus.
No promises on frequency, and none on polish either. Just a light left on in the workshop, for whoever wants to look in.
