Taking stock of 2014, we can see that a few patterns in our work have emerged.
First is the need to focus on what we are – a design company that does projects. We need to remember this because being lucky enough to work on longer-term work, we can be lulled into thinking that just doing things a bit longer – as on-going products – is easy. It is obviously not – and it distracts us from growing our reputation for our project work.
So, with this in mind, our only speculative development work at the moment is in our Football Brain analytics app. It is a long burning process, and when there is early code to see (soon) we will have to think long and hard about whether it is a product (to licence and support) or project (sell and forget). We have a sense of focus and having focus is important but it cannot be singular. We need an overall direction, but the possibility of doing other things too. Next year, we are going to capitalise on our financial experience with more projects and relationships in that area. But our clients in finance like that we also do football, analytics, films and more. So we are talking with some new people in sports, analytics and museums and so forth. It may be time to get back into news design – things seem a little static in that important area.
2014 showed us a steadier path, but we need to not settle into one thing. Somebody else said a business is an experiment in what works. So we will keep on having ideas, testing them, running the experiment.