The One in Love Always Wins
There is a persistent, exhausting habit in our industry of pretending the core of our job is something other than helping companies sell things. That posture tends to relax when it’s time to follow up on an invoice. Until then, the prevailing attitude is that capitalism, scale, and revenue are vulgar, nearly unspeakable things.
We find this tiring. We like talking to people. Every one of us at the studio got into this trade because we were struck early on by the sudden, surprising, pre-verbal communication of a well-made thing. In those moments, as it does now, a small and blurry portal opened up to another person who “gave a shit about me.” If it’s about communication, why would we not be interested in a scale that opens more portals for more people in more places?
When designers are ashamed of the market, they lose contact with the end consumer; they close all portals. The work becomes an insular, performative game of taste, engineered to win the approval of contemporaries. We have no interest in that. We serve the person who it was designed for, not just the client. If you actually care about injecting grace, intelligence, or beauty into the things people between the coasts encounter and depend on every day, the commercial is where the people actually are.
The deception is believing that because the container is commercial, the contents are corrupted into the transactional.
A transaction is binary and requires only the bare minimum. Everything beyond that minimum is surplus. It is neither asked for nor forced. And yet, you feel its absence immediately. You know the exact, soul-flattening sensation of handling an object or using a piece of software that meets a faceless brief. And you know the strange thrill of its opposite: the feeling that the person who made this thing knew something about me, and at its best they knew something about me I didn’t know until now.
The catch, of course, is that this care is almost always one-sided. Most people tearing open a box or clicking a button are in the middle of a busy Tuesday; they will never consciously notice the hours spent agonizing over a hinge or a typeface, and they certainly won’t write you a thank-you note for it.
Cynicism is a defensive crouch. It’s calculating and cold, tallying the exact minimum amount of care required to get paid, terrified of looking foolish by giving away too much for free.
We’ll happily be the fool in love. Optimism is the decision to give more than the sale requires. We choose to believe in portals of care, an impossibly real connection between the person who imagines a better thing and the person who eventually lives with it.