2009. The Year to be Small & Focused.

Firstly, an apology for being one of those blogs that rarely gets updated. It’s been a long time coming to write a blog entry. My excuse: our every internal effort has been put in creating a new visual identity for ourselves. And internal efforts are pushed aside for client work. This means that the blog, well, got neglected. Sorry! New visual identity will be revealed in Q1 (Q1=padded, non-committal date).

2008 has been an eventful year for you. Yup, you read right, for you. It was a year that saw your investments plummet, and a year that promised you “change”. Change can be good, change can be bad. But change was definitely in the air this year for you.

I suggest that 2008 was the year that big became uncool. Big loans, big debts, big car companies, big wars and big promises. All blew up big and showed us that we need to change our way of thinking. No more spending more than our means and living the big American dream. Maybe the problem was scale. If we thought small, if we cared about the little guy and the little things, we may not be in the big mess that we seem to be in? Maybe we could have set up schools to teach something useful to a group of 20 kids at a time, rather than map out how to spend billions of dollars to conquer countries and seize the big oil?

I am going to, narcissistically, use DesignStamp as an example of why I have always thought that small is better than big. Here are top reasons why:

1. Small and focused = not being anything like the BIG 3. And that’s a good thing.
2. Smaller hierarchical overhead means, we react faster, and create solutions that best meet market and client needs.
3. Our greatest strength is to keep our focus on what we do best. To bring 3 sometimes seemingly contrary worlds together and have them build the same thing: brand, business and technology. Technology simply provides the tools for us to translate business goals and create better experiences that build strong brands.
4. We use fewer resources by not having a big office to maintain and virtualize how we work. We pass that benefit to our clients through reduced costs. We also drive less. Really. We are the masters of modern communication and work with people around the world efficiently and effectively. Our productivity and miles-driven ratio, we hope, is inspiring for other businesses.
5. We spend more time in discovery than we do in execution. Smarter initial questions asked means we spend less in overall budget than large production teams that just build what business owners think is required. Our small team model demands shorter production cycles as do our clients budgets.
6. Our bottom-line effects each of us personally. We are all invested in building a profitable, sustainable business. The level of care is reflected in the work we do. If it won’t look good in our portfolio, we won’t do it.
7. Flexibility is the requirement in this economy. We have always valued that in how we approach projects. Whether it is the size of the team assigned to our project, or the technology we use, we are not married to any particular format/platform, if it is not right for you. Our process has flexibility built right into it.
8. We are not anonymous, we do good work by being personally accountable and maintaining a positive attitude. This creates strong constructive relationships between us and our clients. Most of our clients come back to us for projects, which means we develop a shorthand with them that is invaluable.
9. We partner with our clients. We don’t work as external agencies to just deliver the goods asked of them. We function as partners who can validate business goals with audience adoption and technical constraints.
10. We love challenges and constraints. Designers are trained to not just accept boundaries and limitations, but prove value within them. Designers of buildings and furniture work within the constraints of gravity and space to provide excellent solutions. We do the same within the limitations such as pre-defined budgets of time and costs.

So I suggest that if you are focusing on the right thing you have nothing to fear. Fear is self-perpetuating and only leads to more of itself. Positivity breeds positivity. We value clients who remain positive in challenging times, and we do our best to bring a level of fun to every project.

Our focus is to remain small, and steadfast in what we do, and how we do it. We wish you a fulfilling 2009 in which you see small things bring disproportionate happiness to you!