Things we just felt like making
Not everything we make has a client attached. That's on purpose, and it might be the most practical thing we do.
On our work page there’s a line we’re fond of: a mix of client exclusives, team favorites, and things we just felt like making. The first two categories explain themselves. This is about the third.
Work with no brief
Every so often, somebody here builds something nobody asked for. A little tool that scratches an itch. Type experiments that go further than any client would sign off on. A design for a problem no one has hired us to solve yet. Merch, sometimes, because a hoodie is a canvas like anything else.
There’s no schedule to any of it. Some seasons produce a pile, other seasons produce nothing, because appetite isn’t a deliverable and we’ve decided not to manage it like one.
No brief, no budget line, no approval chain. Which means there’s also no excuse. When a client project falls short, there’s always somewhere for the blame to drain: the timeline was tight, the feedback was contradictory, the scope moved. Work made for nobody has none of that cover.
It’s exactly as good as you are.
That’s uncomfortable. It’s supposed to be.
What it’s actually for
The obvious answer is practice, and that’s part of it. Tools change fast in this business, and the safest place to learn one is a project where failure costs nothing. You don’t want to discover the limits of a new technique inside somebody’s launch week.
But the deeper answer is appetite. Client work, done well, is a disciplined act of serving someone else’s goals. Do only that, year after year, and a certain muscle goes quiet: the one that wants things. Unbilled work keeps the wanting alive. It reminds everyone here what their own taste looks like when nobody’s paying for it, which turns out to be the same taste clients are buying when somebody is.
Scale matters too. Client projects are marathons with many hands on them. A side project is small enough for one person to hold entirely, first decision to final export, and that completeness is its own education. You remember what it feels like to be responsible for every choice, which quietly makes you better at the work where you’re responsible for a few.
And some of it goes nowhere. Genuinely nowhere. Half-finished experiments, ideas that seemed better on a Sunday than a Monday. We keep making room for those too, because a place where small failures are cheap is a place where big risks stay possible.
Where it ends up
Here’s the part that makes the accountants tolerate all this. The experiments migrate. More than once, something built for nobody has quietly ended up inside something built for a client: an interaction pattern, a production trick, a way of structuring a build that only got figured out because there was no deadline breathing on it. The client never knows they’re benefiting from a side project. They just know the work feels ahead of where it should be.
It changes the conversations with clients as well. When we recommend a risk, it’s rarely hypothetical. Somebody here has usually tried some version of it on our own time already, and that’s a different kind of reassurance than a slide full of theory.
And it shapes who’s in the building. People who make things when no one’s watching tend to find each other. A portfolio of unbilled work is a quiet signal, and we’ve followed it more than once when deciding who to bring into the colony.
So no, the third category doesn’t show up on an invoice. It shows up in everything the invoices are for.
There’s a lighter in our shop with a line printed on the side: every good idea starts with a spark. Nobody commissioned it.
That’s exactly why it exists.
