This is sadly and painfully spot-on. So much so, in fact, that part of me wants to laugh, part of me wants to cry, and part of me wants to throw something across the room.

I always enjoy reading Khoi Vinh’s writings on design and development—they’re incredibly thoughtful and thought-provoking, whether he’s writing about the importance of grids in design, blogging, or technology in general.

His most recent post, on the topic of design agencies and studios, and the quality of their work, hits especially close to home:

When a design operation scales up the equation becomes much more diffuse. Beyond a certain point, a business of designers is no longer a studio—focusing on a specific niche of design, or devoting energies into a small number of projects at once—but rather an agency—a provider of multiple services, staffed by different kinds of specialists. Ideas must travel more complicated routes from brains to hands, and reconciling conflicting signals becomes difficult.

It’s certainly not the case that agencies are inherently staffed by inferior designers. That’s not what I’m saying, let me be clear. In fact, I’ll freely grant that designers employed at agencies are very often more talented than those employed at in-house design groups (except for those in my group, of course).

The problem is that the structures of most larger design businesses cannot effectively facilitate the the transmittal of ideas. They don’t allow good design to happen, because they are overburdened with the organizational overhead of running a business: org charts, jurisdictions, inconsistency, poor communications, etc. All the complications that large groups of humans create for one another when they work together, complications that are not about doing design.

 

You can read the full post here.

I say this hits close to home because one of the responsibilities of my day job is ensuring that a disparate group of people—all of them very talented—work together efficiently to create solid work without getting bogged down too much by the bureaucracies and politics—the organizational overhead of running a business, as Vinh puts it—that are unfortunately inherent to large groups of people working together.

Word to the wise: anyone who starts using “socialstainable”, “scrollax”, “emotrics”, “facehook” or any of the other top 10 made up words of Web 3.0 for real deserves a good, swift kick in the nuts.

Just a whee bit of tooting one’s own horn… One of the projects that I’ve been working on lately is the website for the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, which is currently running. The festival is in its second year, and festival director Adam Lopez was running himself ragged in the weeks leading up to the festival trying to create buzz for the festival.

One of Adam’s cooler coups was a spotlight and interview on the SPACE channel, which is Canada’s equivalent of the Sci-Fi Channel.

The festival’s website URL was flashed on the screen towards the end, and it’s always exciting to see one’s work mentioned on TV, in one way or another. More importantly, though, here’s hoping the spotlight drummed up plenty of interest for the festival, and that Lopez and Co. will be back in 2008.

I mentioned earlier that one of our own here at Firespring has left the building. Which means that we’re now hiring for a newly created web developer position.

You can read the full job description here. But essentially we’re looking for someone who is solid when it comes to both pushing pixels around in Photoshop and firing up their text editor and diving into (X)HTML/CSS/JavaScript (and even PHP from time to time).

Let me know if you have any questions.

As of today, the company that I work for—Digital IMS, Inc.—is no more. We’ve unveiled our new brand and identity, and from now on, will be known as Firespring. You can read the official announcement here.

This has been a long process, as I imagine most rebranding processes are. The challenge was finding a name and identity that was memorable and helped us stick out from the crowd, and that also communicated something about the company’s values and spirit. At the same time, we didn’t want to pick a name that sounded good simply because it sounded good. We didn’t want something that would seem trivial, dated, or cheesy 5 years from now.

In other words, we didn’t want anything remotely “Web 2.0.”

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