In the past year we’ve been approached by six different agencies wishing to acquire smashLAB. Some were big players, two were regional firms, and the others were working as agents for other operations. Needless to say, we found all of this quite flattering, even if it wasn’t really on our agenda.
It’s summer and I’ve been writing very little. (Lately the beach has taken priority.) A couple of weeks ago, Mark Dudlik asked me a few questions for a magazine he’s involved with called Fill/Stroke. Mark’s been kind enough to allow me to repurpose this piece on ideasonideas. Here goes… (and now I’m off to sit in the sun).
A year ago I started to write a book on creativity. In it I discuss how we’ve made this notion so mythic that it has become ridiculously exclusive. This seems rather silly, given that it’s learnable, just like any other discipline. The point, however, is that all this time has passed, and I only have half a book ready (I’m a walking cliché—sorry folks!)
Of my daily reads, Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch is one I most enjoy. It’s an amazing look into the new ideas (some great, and some “not so much”) that people have for the web. Today I took special notice of Erick Shonfeld’s post about Google’s search tool: SearchMash. In part, I’m interested in anything “Google”, but this time I also found something a little fishy.
”Holy crap.” That’s pretty much all I have to say about a year that’s quickly coming to a close. I often find that New Year’s Eve is filled with regret for things I haven’t done. This year however, I can only be grateful. Personally, professionally, and just all around, this past year has been a very nice one. Let’s quickly look over some of the things we noted and experienced in 2006.
As I can best recall, we started our firm with two key motives: The first was to generate enough revenue to allow ourselves more control over our destinies; the second was to establish a venue within which we could make design that somehow mattered. Be it the difficult financial climate that we began in, or our pragmatic tendencies, we often made choices that gave preference to that of financial stability.
So, I figure it’s time to finally do it. I’m going to write a little about the “Creative Within” campaign. It was one of the strangest experiences I’ve been a part of, and now that the noise has died down, I feel I can comment without seeming like I’m trying to justify our efforts. Back in the spring, we were really wrestling with the idea of a promotional piece for smashLAB. With most other projects, the conceptual process seems pretty straight-forward; however, with this one, we kept spinning in circles. As most of our work is relatively conservative, we wanted to mix things up by doing something playful and cheeky.
In the late summer, Tim, Peter, and I started to work on the new smashLAB brochure. These pieces have become a bit of a mission for me. I feel that the way we present ourselves gives a strong representation for how we are working, and the directions which interest us. By the time that this particular brochure came up, we had spent several months working to stretch the conceptual directions in our work.