Something significant for us happened this week.
More accurately, something significant didn’t happen for us this week—after nearly a year-and-a-half of continuous, uninterrupted week-daily posting to our studio’s web journal, we made the conscious decision to break from that daily schedule.
The initial move to daily posting came in February of 2014 and coincided with a massive overhaul of our studio’s web site wherein we pulled our journal into the fabric of the site in an effort to merge two established online personas. Before that, via Google’s Blogger, we’d started the blog that became this journal (formerly and separately branded as Kindness of Ravens) way back in 2008. Those four or five years, we ran it much more as a personal, more casual portal for our creative output when Blogging was more at its height, thus the separation from our professional persona. We also only posted every now and then, not on any sort of schedule. The move to daily posts in 2014 was an experiment to see how it affected our output—sticking to a scheduling and folding the writing and coverage more into raven + crow as a professional design studio, we wanted to see how it would change and hopefully improve what we did and how we did it.
Taking this more measured approach to the journal definitely affected things in a positive aspect—we feel the writing refined and, more importantly, the focus on what we wrote about, why, and how grew more sharpened. We reigned in our focus to coverage of design, art, music, culture, and the vegan food scene and, as a result, felt more motivated and engaged both with our subjects and our audience. What’s more, making this move gave us a kind of excuse to reach out and open up communication with groups and individuals in and outside of our field, which, likewise, opened up our lives professionally and socially. Very much like that picture of a salad in early 2013 that very much led to both longterm clients and professional partnerships, we can draw direct lines from work we’ve done on these pages and outreach behind the writing to real-world relationships we’ve developed. Which is clearly awesome.
Now, after stepping back and seeing the results of this deliberate shift, we’re making yet another move for greater focus by not holding ourselves to a daily schedule. It was a successful experiment and one we’re glad we embarked upon, but we feel we can both further curate the content that appears here by posting less and, honestly, devote more time to other, non-online things in the real world, be them professional, personal, or something in-between.
Below, an outtake from our 2014 shoot for the new site + about page where we look way too much like your new favorite band.
