Studio Update #17: Forward Momentum

These last 10 days have been a lot of overthinking and procrastinating about the studio, the work we’ve been doing, and my personal relationship with design in general. Currently, there are mismatches (as I’ve found after a lot of reflection) in the way I’m currently running the studio and the way I’d like to be running the studio, and I’ve come to realize that those mismatches are rather large and may require a lot of restructuring. That means more hiring, lower margins on projects, and 2–3x more effort on marketing. Right now, HEX is at too comfortable a position: we’re seeing a reasonable cash flow, no growth, low overhead, and relatively steady lead cycle. There are months that go up and down, but there are no signs of explosive growth.

There are obviously a lot of benefits to a business like this, but I do find it eating up a lot of my time / energy in a way that might not be scalable after a few years. To set up HEX in a way it can sustain itself, I want to be aiming a little higher with our deal sizes. And for that, we need to work on growth.

After coming up with a bunch of ideas (some realistic, others not), I’ve found that there is only one way to win and that is to start. Gain a small level of positive momentum. No matter how small or insignificant it may seem, positive momentum will always lead to improvement and growth. Getting items off the checklist and slowly + steadily improving little things across hiring, marketing, client deliverables, sales, etc will stack up.

So back to regularly scheduled programming, this week’s been getting those items off the checklist.

I wrote the following as my target items last update:

new IG reel

new personal brand project to show the evolution in our work

case study for wayfinder.

I also mentioned that I wanted to finish the product retainer application which we did. I was invited to chat with their team and things are looking “so far so good” as we wait to hear back.

1. The new IG reel is out. I kind of hate it and deleted it once before reposting an alternative version. I’m still learning short-form video and sticking to the consistency which is why I kept it up. I’ll get better with more videos published, but have a look (0 likes lol)

https://www.instagram.com/p/C-Uf9uwR-0v

2. New brand work. We have a new identity project that we did as a test to see if we can take some risks and get better. I’ve found that we’re REALLY good at getting to a level where we have some super unique visual identity expressed in this very digital + static format. bento grids, web screens, social media layouts, etc.

But after this stage, things get kind of hard and “foreign”. That’s probably because I’m personally very into Figma and it doesn’t have the native mockup support I’d like it to have. Also, the work we do is often for tech companies that don’t really need “tote bag realistic render mockups”. I mentioned wanting to bring in a motion designer for our case studies who can take these to the next level, but I need to still make sure that it’s the right investment for us. More on that in a bit.

3. Finally, we have a new case study out for Wayfinder. One of our biggest branding projects so far and my personal fav project of all time. The case study is a v1 as I’m yet to add some copy on it. I would also like to do some kind of motion design work that we can use as a teaser. I also want to work a little bit to refine some of the graphics before we submit it to the usuals: The Brand Identity, Creative Boom and It’s Nice That.

For now, check it out at hex.inc/work/wayfinder.

For client work, we developed new moodboards and concepts for a VC client, closed a new project (!), started a new poster series for an existing client, made progress on product graphics for our website client, and finished the product retainer application I mentioned earlier.

That’s all for the week.

Another thing on my mind: My personal twitter is kind of a mess. I have a solid following and I have pretty good quality content, but the volume at which I share is crazy. 10 tweets a day of work might be a little too overwhelming. My tweets are often fighting one another for engagement. I should probably be more strategic and spread my tweet schedule across the period of 12 hours instead of spiradically posting over 5 mins. But idk since whenever I’ve tried that, it’s never gone super well. I’m not sure what the solution is here, but this isn’t that big a problem at this stage.

• Come up with a way to do reach-out. I’ve closed a lot of incredible projects by simple reach-out, but it’s never been super scalable. I need to come up with some way that’s automated but also high quality. The best solution would be if I can find who we reach out to, and a software can write the message based on a script I define. I should be able to find something for this.
• Do a v2 of Wayfinder case study with copy, messaging, and animated graphics and submit it to: It’s Nice That, Creative Boom, Brand Identity. This will force me to find someone to work with as a partner.
• Put out a “week in the studio” Reel. Same concept as these updates but in a 30 second video format. Quickly talk over what we did so far + show some videos of the work. This will be a good new idea. I just need to figure out a scalable way to record and edit without spending hours. Maybe hire an editor after a few test videos.

Cool. This was a relatively long studio update but also needed after a bunch of shorter ones.