Week 27: Here we go again.
Welcome to the second half of 2016. Time flies, right? 👼
Hi! As you might already know I’m Harry and this is a series of weekly blog posts summarizing what happens to my me and my teammates at diesdas.digital, a now six-months-old digital studio based in Berlin. Admittedly I don’t really know how to continue after last week’s massive update … but we shall see. Ready? Let’s do this!
I came back from holidays on Wednesday, so it should’ve felt like a short week, but oh boy … quite to the contrary! These three days were packed and my brain is simply not capable of organizing everything back into chronological order. Instead, let’s just do little self-contained topics, because sub headlines are fun!
Welcome Nicolás!
As avid readers might have noticed: There’s a new face on the picture above! That’s Nicolás Bonifer, an excellent front-end developer and all-around super nice person who’s gonna support us in the foreseeable future. Lars randomly bumped into him at a party, Nicolás had just started freelancing and we urgently needed support on a few projects, so here we are, sitting in an office together. \o/
Personally I couldn’t be happier to have Nicolás on board, mainly for two reasons:
- Most of our projects involve designing and building web stuff, and development is usually the bottleneck, taking the longest time and having many dependencies, like hosting/deployment, resulting in increased communication effort towards the end of projects. Our team setup with Lars+Max mostly doing design and Lorenz+I handling all things code just wasn’t scaling to the number of projects we have right now. One designer can usually keep multiple developers busy … so our 50:50 ratio was rather inefficient. Having Nicolás on the team definitely ramps up our output and additionally reduces pressure for Lorenz and me.
- Looking at the bigger picture of what’s good for the company I felt we had reached a good point to grow the team. New people always mean new approaches, new opinions and new perspectives. That’s absolutely vital and I would’ve found it quite sad if it had still been the four of us by the end of the year. Crisis averted.
Also, having two more desks in the office makes a huge difference. Feels way more profesh now. 😎 (And as always, huge shout-out to häberlein & mauerer for continuing to share their office space with us!)
What else? Lorenz teaches techmology at HTW Berlin!
Each Tuesday Lorenz is away, teaching at HTW Berlin — this obviously presents a challenge because we’re very few people and even one person being gone for a day (each week) does make a noticeable difference. At the same time we enjoy sharing what we know (and learning new stuff from the students as well), so we think it’s the right thing to do. Project work has to take a step back here and I’m glad we can just make that decision and run with it!
Agency websites and branding … le sigh.
On Thursday Lars and I met with the CEO of another agency … they mostly work on non-digital projects and were evaluating a strategic partnership (with us, in this case). So far so interesting, but at some point we digressed and started talking about branding for agencies and how to stick out from the slew of other studios basically doing the same thing. I came across this tweet recently, which appears related:
Looking at that cluster of sameness I’m super glad we’re doing things a bit differently, putting people at the center of our communication and conveying how we work and what we do through sharing our experiences, instead of showing colorful project tiles with a dimmed layer and white text on top. Our website is at best serving as a hub for everything else we put out. This wasn’t a deliberate concept from the start, but the more I look at it and the more feedback we get, I feel that’s exactly the right thing to do: Not having one home on the web with everything on it, but rather spreading out and maintaining many smaller satellites, feeding into a bigger narrative, being where people already are, at eye-level with them.
[Oh, and speaking of feedback: Hi Linus, we received your postcard! Thank you so much, this is what keeps us going! You made our day, we’re gonna frame that card and hang it in the office! 😅]
Workshop time!
On Friday Lars flew to Mannheim for a workshop series we’re doing in collaboration with Baumgardt Consulting, attempting to find out how people use public transport in different German cities and then developing ideas and prototypes for improving their experiences and efficiency of touch points. From what I heard the workshop went well and everyone was happy with the output. Here’s a photo from the one before, which happened in a different city … 👇
Upcoming: Yours truly at Tough Mudder!
The big thing next week will be Germany’s edition of Tough Mudder, happening over the next weekend and we’re all in (the mud)! Action cams are ordered and we plan to capture our desperate attempts to survive on video. It’s gonna get ugly. 💩
Also … these shirts! 😍
Wrapping it up with two more random tidbits …
- I was on the phone with a client this week and the inevitable happened: “Can we please open external links in a new window” … I wrote a short blog post to vent out my frustration: Nope, we cannot open this link in a new window/tab. Send it to your clients next time they ask you to do the same thing.
- We were rather quiet on social media this week, because first I was on holidays and then we were slammed with work … next week will be better (feels like I’m saying that every week), especially with all the Tough Mudder preparations, so you might want to follow us on Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. If you don’t want to miss any new recaps in the future, you can also subscribe to this publication. 🙌
And here we are, reaching the end of this week’s post. We hope you can take something away and as always: feedback is very welcome! Ask us anything, we’re happy to share! Until then, take care, have a nice weekend and see you next week on the interwebs! 🙃
