2009

It’s been a Bubblicious year for Matt and me. In July, I left my good job at Blue Flavor, joined thingsthatarebrown, and started my own business. Since August, I’ve finished 18 projects of various sizes and written four articles. Matt worked his face off, completing over 26 projects, speaking, attending conferences, and writing — thingsthatarebrown has grown furiously.

In the personal sphere, we went on seven big trips, bought our first car, and got married. Matt took up boxing. I dabbled in trapeze.

As I mentioned in a Second and Park blog post, we have been fortunate. We’ve got good friends and supportive colleagues cheering us on. Our families like us. The recession didn’t bash our business in. Working together has actually brought us closer, rather than straining our marriage (as many suspected it would).

Still, there are some things we sucked at. We didn’t cook enough, and didn’t allow enough time for making and seeing art. I said yes to way too many projects. We didn’t always begin and end our days crisply. But hey—bygones.

2010

Next year, we want to take things up a notch. Our #1 goal is to seriously improve our thingsthatarebrown work and grow into a deeper, better agency. We want our work and process to more accurately represent our tastes and talents. We want to collaborate more. Here’s how we plan on doing it:

Reposition thingsthatarebrown. This year, we’re rolling out new services and refining our process. Instead of focusing on design, templates and development, we’ll be focusing on strategy, art direction, copywriting, and design. In other words, TTAB is no longer one guy cranking out IA and design. It’s the both of us, focusing on really solving our clients problems and helping them communicate the right message. This critical thinking-heavy, strategy-not-tactics approach is what we’re good at, and what we like.

Rethink Second and Park. Second and Park has been an unexpected and fast success, but it can’t be my full-time job. A while back, I wrote that copy is not enough—meaning that it takes strategy and copy and design to really get the right message across. Accordingly, I’ll be doing most of my copy and strategy work in conjunction with design projects this year, and therefore spending more time at thingsthatarebrown.

More and Better Writing. This is our pet project. The brown blog is nowhere near what we think it can be, and we plan to fix that. Expect us to complete our thoughts, pursue ideas further, post more often, and write articles and how-to’s in addition to regular old posts.

More Speaking. I’m speaking at SXSW and both Matt and I are speaking at Microsoft Mix10, so we’ve already beat last year’s record—but it would be really nice if we could find one more conference in, say, Paris or Berlin to speak at. Just to keep it mixxy.

More Art. This means more art of every kind in our work and lives. Our refined strategy and discovery phases will reflect this thinking, as will the little choices we make daily about how we spend our time. And yes: by art I do mean the standard menu of museums, music, flights of fancy, and books.

More Travel. If all goes well, we’ll squeeze in some quality overseas time. Eventually we want to live overseas part-time; this year is our trial run.

Fewer Projects. We simply can’t meet our goals and take on the project load we did in 2009. So, it’s fewer yesses and projects for us in 2010.

Remember What We’re About. In addition to wanting freedom and flexibility, we started our companies because we think that good, honest communication makes businesses better and more exciting.That’s what our writing and design are about. We’ll try to keep this thinking front and center as we tumble through next year. Thanks to Howard Mann for framing the concept.

And that’s it! We hope you have a happy 2010, and that you feel clear and energized the whole time. If you’ve got any goals or inspiration you’d like to share, feel free to bring that ruckus here.