Week 38: The greatest job in the world
A new project on the horizon and a hymn of praise on our job
Hey there, this is Lorenz, one of the founders of diesdas.digital, a Berlin-based product and brand development studio, with a team of six people. Wait, who? Yep, while Harry is on his well deserved holidays I took over the duty of giving you the 38th weekly recap of what we are doing here at our little company.
A few updates and #diesdasontour
On Friday Max, Sharon and I travelled to London to give a presentation for a prospective new client. For a one and a half hour presentation we had to spend around six to seven hours traveling which can be quite ‘anstrengend’ (german for exhausting, one of Sharon’s favorite german words). When coming to London, you have to first show your passport, let them scan your eyeballs and then cameras are following every step you take. At least it feels like that. Is that really the world we want to live in #controversial? On a side-note, we spend around £150 just on public transport 😱. To sum up, the presentation went quite well and we’ll probably come to London again soon. We’ll keep you posted. Also — while being in a city with over eight million inhabitants we accidentally bumped into our good friend Maximilian, who happens to work there for over half a year now. Well, the world is a village.
Some other news of the week. Lars went out to visit a potential office space for us. While the space looks rather perfect, the monthly rent gets us kinda light-headed. There is so much involved in getting your own office space because it costs way more than just the monthly rent. We have to buy tables, chairs and probably a kitchen. Also, we want to equip a meeting room with a TV, table, chairs and a flip chart (most important thing 🙃). All these things together will probably cost us 20k and that feels like a big commitment for a still very small company like ours. Well, we’ll see.
The greatest job in the world
This week I thought about giving you a rather personal insight about why I think that we are doing the greatest job in the world. Since the beginning of this year, that feeling is even more true than ever before.
The most valid reason to me is that I don’t think of our work as a job. It more or less feels like a hobby or project that I want to invest as much time as possible in. Why is that so?
Because I learn something new every day. When we started this company we worked on a lot of smaller projects, like doing an app store video for a small startup, designing a website for a doctor as well as creating an explanatory video and cinema spot. All these jobs provided us with so much knowledge!
Before we never spend much time into understanding how app store videos work or how to give people guidance to decide whether they want to trust a doctor – who has a kind of unusual approach by combining various therapies. I also never created a storyboard for a cinema commercial and worked as a voice actor for that commercial too. These jobs, as small or unimportant they might seem, lead to investigating new techniques and ways to tell a story.
Although we have a lot of experience in working with big brands, developing digital products or coming up with strategies to get your message out the door, every new project is a step into unknown territories. People working in our industry often like to complain about bad clients who don’t acknowledge their skills — myself included — but, when we stop for a moment and think about it: there is no bad client. Even the worst people have something to offer, be it some knowledge or an experience that helps you better understand how their industry thinks and works. Nevertheless we are lucky to turn down a project if we feel that collaboration just doesn’t work. But there is a trick to find out if a collaboration may go smoothly or not. The client must be willing to learn something new, which is also true for yourself. Surround yourself with people that are willing to learn and try out something new, because they will have an impact on you. It simply makes you more productive and helps you to stay curious. Also you constantly have to remind yourself that you don’t know everything and that’s totally fine.
Humans are born to explore. That’s why I am curious about every new project we are working on or every new client we are working with. We can dive into so many industries from newspapers, to medicine, to type design and more, sometimes it’s mind-boggling — in a good way.
Before Harry left for vacation, he, Nicolas and I had a meeting about what we can do from a development perspective to learn new things and stay curious while constantly working on projects. We decided, that we want to make the bold move to learn and try out a new technology for every upcoming project. That shouldn’t mean that we are not relying on already established practices but we want to know what the latest trends are, how to execute them and if they are of value to our client projects.
OK, that’s grand, what else?
Well, if you are as curious as we are than you might want to check out our other recaps on Medium, check out our Tumblr for your daily dose of gifs, enjoy our Instagram, read our Tweets, just say hi or even consider to work with us on your new project. We might learn something new together, 🤘!
See you next week, when we might have some exciting news to share! Ciao for now and take care.
