We’re back in the saddle again after closing the studio for the last two weeks of December. It always confounds me how surprised people are when we say we’ll be closed for that long, as though it were excessive. That amount of time feels to me about the minimum I’d want to genuinelystart to unwind, and if we didn’t close the studio we’d basically get nothing done except coordinate who was and wasn’t around. I took the time to drive down to Santa Barbara via Highway 1 & stare at the water with my wife and do very little else, which was just about perfect.
In any event we’re back, and a few interesting things are starting to happen. We’re as booked up as we’ve ever been, which is marvelous but brings its own kinds of stresses — how are we going to get all this work done in a way that still leaves room for invention, discovery and play — and Deborah and I are spending an ever-growing amount of time working out schedules and planning. A resolution the studio’s committed to for 2010 is that no project will ever have less than 2 people working on it — if we learned anything last year it’s that we’re stronger when we lean on each other, and that getting lost in the details of a project is much less likely when you’ve got someone who’s intimately familiar with what you’re working on.
A little about what’s coming up — we’re continuing to work with MTV and Twitter on real-time spectacle/analysis of what the internet thinks, and Mike is taking a close look at how that all fits together, in addition to speaking down at Stanford today on some map-related work we’d like to do. Shawn is continuing to work with the London Olympics on refinements to their map, and the two of us spent some time today looking into the datasets of two projects we’re considering taking on. Tom, Sha and Aaron have been working on a project for CNET mapping wireless signals (more on that soon), specifically for a demo at CNET’s CES booth in Vegas this week, at which (apparently) Drew Carey stopped by to chat:
And Geraldine continues to refine just about everything we touch. We had our first Dreams and Aspirations meeting for the year, and the studio feels very much on the same page to me; we have some differences about the sizes of jobs we’d like to be doing (lots of little projects? a few giant ones? how many independent projects?), but I know we’ll deal with those the way we always do, through lots of talking and responding to changes in the business & creative opportunities that come our way as the year goes.
As for me, I’m settling in: trying to get the website back in order after a busy 2009 (there’re a pile of projects that need posting), spending about half my time on the phone with potential new clients, and adding some patina to the studio in the form of maps (see the first photo — an amazing bathymetric set of maps of the world I found in Santa Barbara), hooks, books and plants. HQ2 is very different from HQ1 — for one thing, there’s room enough to spread 20 feet of map on the floor, and hang 11 feet long maps of Africa that I bought at the flea market last Sunday — and it has a bit less of that Sam Spade feel (since I’ve never actually lived here). I’m reading Ove Arup’s biography and Steve Martin’s autobiography, thinking about the lives of these men and the levels they operate(d) at and how they worked hard and how their dreams came true. I walk into the studio just about every day with a sense of real possibility and calm; the space calms me down and lifts me up at the very same moment, if that’s possible.