On Friday, we were named the 2014 Net Awards Agency of the Year. What makes this award very special is that it was awarded to us by our peers. Unlike many other award shows, you don’t enter the Net Awards, nor is there an entry fee. The process begins with the editors of Net Magazine creating a long list in each category. The long list is then open for general voting from anyone in the industry.

This public voting generates a short list which is handed to a panel of 100 judges from across the industry. Based on this, a winner in each category is selected. Judges vote online blind to how others vote.

To be recognized on the long list, short list and alongside the winner’s of the other categories was amazing. To be named alongside Mailchimp, Sublime Text, Sass, Creative Mornings, Mike Monteiro, Grunt and others as a winner, is quite an honour.

This is the first time we’ve ever won Agency of The Year.

To everyone who voted for us, thank You.
To the judges, thank you.
To the editors of Net Magazine, thank you.
To the other winners, we are honoured to stand alongside you.
To all the staff and clients, both past and present, thank you for making this company what it is today.

To see a full list of winners. Go to the Net Awards site.

Oct 2nd marks 11 years of Teehan+Lax. This anniversary has the awkwardness of not being the symbolic milestone of the decade we celebrated in 2012. But another way to think about this year is that it is the start of our next decade. A second chapter in the company’s history. So I choose to think of it that way, rather than the morning after the big party.

This year has been a stark dividing line in our business. I feel like we have more insights and thoughts about where “digital” (I have no idea what to call the space we work in anymore so I will use that, forgive me) is going—and our role inside of that—than we ever have since Geoff and I founded the company.

But simultaneously, this has been a very challenging year. So please indulge me as I speak about the good and the bad.

A lot of what happened in 2013 began with thinking that started in 2012, and a few nagging thoughts that have haunted me for a number of years.

Attending a party several years ago, I looked around the room. I did a mental tally of who did what for a living and noticed a disturbing pattern: The vast majority of people in this room worked in advertising or marketing. There were one or two lawyers, a few investment advisors/bankers, but most were people who made their living doing some form of marketing.

I realized that among my friends, I couldn’t find a single doctor or scientist, not one person in manufacturing, or a small business owner or entrepreneur of something other than a consulting or services firm (I include myself in this count).

These were people I have known since high school and university, prior to their career choices. So this wasn’t just some self selected group of industry people.

Growing up, I was surrounded by lawyers, doctors and accountants. Like many families of first or second generation Canadians, my grandparents insisted that their children would have a life better than theirs. Education and particularly a professional degree were expected. My parents fulfilled their part of the bargain and are both lawyers.

Our parents went into the traditional professional careers of their generation; medicine, law, accounting, maybe something like architecture if you were creative. Our generation went into marketing.

I realized that in this group, no one was actually “making” anything. My entire generation had grown up to go into professions focussed around selling things to other people. I felt sick.

This realization came in the thick of the financial crisis, which itself had been caused by this phenomenon. A modern economy that didn’t make anything, but rather just derived value through intermediaries that took their cut as they passed something down the line.

I began to think about the work we were doing at Teehan+Lax, and I asked myself: what are we making? Is our work adding value to the world? Is it sustainable?

Increasingly, I feared that we were creating what Made by Many call “Digital Landfill.”

I didn’t really know what to do, so I pushed it down, focussed on running the business that was speeding towards its 10 year anniversary, and decided I would try to steer Teehan+Lax to a company that made things that people would actually want and enjoy using.

It was during this time I saw the XOXO Festival, and I knew we had to support it. I’ve never admitted this to Andy Baio or Andy McMillan but their Kickstarter came at a time I was trying to process a lot of these feelings.

I originally felt that XOXO was like a carbon offset. I could support it to offset our own making deficiencies. I identified heavily with the community and culture XOXO promoted, mainly because I wanted Teehan+Lax to be admired by that community for making amazing things. I attended the first XOXO and was changed by the experience.

I returned from XOXO determined that over the next year, we would aggressively make things that would find an audience based on merit. We would do this on behalf of clients and ourselves.

So let me fast-forward ahead to talk about 2013 and why I feel that we have turned the corner and are beginning to pay off on some of these ideas.

We started the year launching the new teehanlax.com.

Typical agency sites are awful. They are the equivalent of Charlie Brown’s teacher (wah wah wah wah).

The layouts are the same, the copy is the same. In this fantasy land, all projects achieve triple digit percentage performance improvements and everything goes exactly as planned. Of course, this is complete garbage.

We tried to create a site that would not only tell the stories of how we made things, but hopefully help others make things of quality, substance and lasting value. We also believe the only way to learn is to make mistakes, so we talk about those too. We talk about what we learned so hopefully you might avoid similar pitfalls on the road.

We tried to make something of value with our site. Not just a brochure that tries to convince you to hire us.

The biggest complaint we get (other than some people not liking our nav system), is that clients don’t understand what we do. We’re thinking about how to solve this, but for now we’re ok with being misunderstood as long as we are inspiring and helping other creative professionals to make epic shit.

Shortly after we launched our new site, we released the story of our work with Obvious Corp on Medium. This is work we did between June and December 2012, but we only revealed our involvement with it in 2013.

I could write a lot about the experience of Medium and its effect on our company. It came at a time when we wanted to work on substantive products and that intersected exactly at the moment Ev was thinking about building a place for people to share substantive ideas. You got your chocolate in my peanut butter.

Later on, in April, we released a Labs experiment we had been working on called Hyperlapse. You can read the back-story of Hyperlapse on Medium. We didn’t expect the reaction to Hyperlapse that we got. People loved making routes and seeing what they could make with the tool we openly and freely provided.

For us, Hyperlapse’s real success is that we made something people use. We open-sourced it, we made it accessible to everyone. The PR and awards were only by-products of making something people found interesting and useful.

From a work perspective we were executing at our highest levels, but business wasn’t that great. The first half of 2013 was a financial disappointment. Coming off Medium, Geoff Teehan’s team struggled to find a replacement client. While we excused them for the first quarter to work exclusively on Teehanlax.com, we needed them back on clients in Q2. But Q2 came and went without a project.

The services business is cyclical. It also lacks any revenue certainty. We don’t typically know what we will be working on 6 weeks from any given point in time. When these valleys hit, we choose to white knuckle it. We don’t reduce head count, but instead hope to ride the trough and come out the other side. This led to a very stressful 90 days as we watched our profits erode to single digits.

Not a lot of new business was coming in, and the stuff that was coming in was not well-suited for us. Either it lacked the budgets we needed or the projects weren’t a good fit for the kind of work we want to put into the world.

What was incredibly difficult about this was that it seemed our strategy wasn’t working.

Our underlying belief is that: if we make things people want to use, if we create content and tools that help our peers, then our business will succeed.

So what if you execute really well against an idea you believe passionately in, you move your whole company in that direction, and it doesn’t work? Then what?

I spent a lot of time questioning whether our instincts about this idea of “making things of value” were right. It felt right, but we weren’t seeing the results. Maybe we were doing it wrong? Maybe it needed more time? How long could we afford to pursue a strategic approach before calling it a failure?

For business owners, these are the anxieties we live with. We doubt our decisions, we worry that our gut is misleading us, we don’t know what to do.

But even scarier is the fact that our economics make mistakes very expensive. A bad month for us can cost us well into the low 6 figures. It is possible at our current scale to experience a fatal event.

Our friend Darrell Whitelaw says “every agency is 4 months away from going out of business. Doesn’t matter how big you are”.

The stress was also taking its toll internally, causing alienation between the partners. We eventually needed to sit down and talk about what we saw happening in the business. We agreed to continue in our desire to be a company that makes substantive digital products. We decided that we would continue to pursue the direction we believed in. We agreed that this was the hill we would die on.

In July things just started to fall in place. A series of amazing assignments came in. Geoff’s team got snapped up by Prismatic to work on the next version of their product. Betaworks and Raptor Ventures asked us to help them with some of their portfolio companies on some amazing new products. We began working with some other well known companies that make the digital products you use every day.

During our dark Q2 we were able to put together a model that helps companies bring digital products and services to market (we will share this soon). This model is built from the ground up to make digital products that people want to use.

We’ve also spent a lot of time this year eyeing office expansion into the U.S.. We were very close earlier this year. It didn’t work out for a variety of tax-related reasons that are far too boring to go into here, but suffice to say we are still looking at it very seriously.

So here we are… 11 years into this thing, a business that is not a product of planning, but kind of just happened to us. Geoff and I call it “a happy accident”.

But for the first time in a long while, I see more clearly the future of this company.

Our first 10 years was about offering an alternative to large digital agencies. Our next 10 will be making things people want to use.

Read previous anniversary posts:

• 10 years
• 9 Years
• 8 years
• 7 Years
• 6 Years
• The Story of Our Company

Last year, I was intrigued by a Kickstarter started by Andy Baio for something called the XOXO Festival. The Kickstarter page at the time was pretty vague. The description was “A festival this September in Portland, Oregon bringing together artists and toolmakers to celebrate disruptive creativity”. Uhm, ok.

There was something about XOXO that struck a chord with me. It was partly the format: a smallish event with a single track (no panel picker to navigate). But what really appealed to me was the fact that it wasn’t a conference.

Confession: I am not a big conference attendee. I don’t love sitting in a convention centre. I find most have hit-or-miss sessions and in general the overall vibe of conferences isn’t for me. I watch many of my peers trip around the world attending these events and I wonder, “how do they do it?”.

XOXO was about people making things for the love of making things. The motivation of the festival was to bring together people whose intrinsic mission is to make things and then, using new platforms, find an audience; people who have a belief that what they are doing has value, and so they go out into the world to find others who share this belief.

I wanted Teehan+Lax to be a part of making this thing happen.

When I went to fund the project, I looked at the funding levels ($5, $25, $100, $400). I opened Twitter and tweeted at Andy.

“How do I give you more money?”

Andy DM’d me his email address.

I sent him this message

“Put us down for $10,000. Tell me where to send the cheque. Love the idea.”

I never asked Andy what I would get for my money. We never signed a contract. I had no idea if our company logo would even be on materials. I didn’t know Andy, had never met him or his co-creator Andy McMillan. XOXO had no speakers confirmed, it wasn’t even funded as a project, but Teehan+Lax had just become a sponsor. By every business measure this was stupid. I had just signed a cheque for an unknown return.

I felt I understood what Andy and Andy were trying to do. They were trying to create an event whose fundamental underpinning is faith. Not faith in a religious sense, but faith in people.

The festival got funded and sold out in 50 hours. Clearly, others believed as well.

I didn’t speak much with Andy and Andy leading up to the festival. I gave them a copy of our logo, they arranged for some extra tickets so Peter Nitsch could attend. But I left them to do their thing. Faith.

The festival was amazing. You can read my thoughts about it on Medium in this collection. The festival ended with the participants giving the two Andys a standing ovation. They were both moved to tears, not something you see at conferences. Ever.

When I saw that XOXO would return for another year, I sent Andy Baio another message.

“I offer our full love and support again this year.”

So why did we decide to become a patron of XOXO in 2013?

If you view it through the lens of traditional conference sponsorship, it’s an awful deal. Depending on the conference, a primary sponsor (we were one of 3 sponsors of XOXO in 2012) would get very prominent signage, a booth in the common area and often a speaking slot. Sometimes sponsors receive all the contact information of attendees so they can feed them into Salesforce.com and prospect them.

In comparison, XOXO offers us discreet logo placement on materials. I doubt most attendees knew we were a sponsor last year.

But I don’t evaluate XOXO through it’s fiscal ROI.

Invest in what you believe in

We take an approach in business to invest in things we believe in. That is not to say we don’t look at the economics of a situation (i.e. If XOXO Patronage were to go to $1 million it wouldn’t matter how much we believed in it, it would be economically unfeasible). But we don’t look at every investment as having to maximize profit. We invest in things because we believe they are the right thing to do, not because of their potential fiscal return.

Three years ago we started T+L Labs. It had no purpose other than to create experiments. It had no P&L—it was purely a cost of our business. I’ve had numerous agency presidents look at me like we’re insane to do this. Why sacrifice hundred of thousands of dollars of revenue for something that may have no return? Because we believe it makes us smarter and better and eventually that will come back to the company. I don’t know how but I believe it will. Invest in what you believe.

We are in a financial position to support XOXO, so why not support something that is just awesome? Can’t awesome be the return on investment?

This is why the Andys refer to us a Patrons rather than Sponsors. Patronage is a much better term for what we are doing. We believe in the people and the cause because it is inherently worthwhile.

So to the whole XOXO crew, I say this… put our logo on things, don’t put our logo on things. Thank us from the stage, or don’t. Just make something fucking awesome.

You can learn more about the 2013 XOXO Festival on their site.

(This post originally appeared on Medium)

On December 20, 2012 the New York Times released Snow Fall, The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek, a 5 part story of skiers and snowboarders trapped by an avalanche in Washington State’s Cascade mountain range.

It is an amazing story reminiscent of Jon Krakauer’s, now famous 1996 Outside Magazine piece, Into Thin Air. As a piece of journalism, John Branch’s Snow Fall is an extraordinary piece of writing. It is a form of writing not often seen on the Web; long, well researched, impeccably edited, Pulitzer bound. But most of the conversation around the piece surrounds its layout and presentment.

In between the words are incredible motion graphics, videos and photos that bring life to the story. In fact, most people commenting on the story really only viewed it as a picture book. Due to its length and depth I had to carve out a solid hour to read it and haven’t viewed every element.

Snow Fall is everything that Craig Mod outlines in his article “Subcompact Publishing: Simple Tools and Systems For Digital Publishing” isn’t. Snowfall is Epic.

Craig outlines several characteristics of Subcompact Publishing, which arguably Snow Fall follows… it has clear navigation, HTMLish, Open Web etc. But Craig’s overall theme in Subcompact publishing is that it is lightweight, lesser than by design. Subcompact publishing is really something that should be easy to do.

In contrast, Snow Fall was not easy to do. It took 11 people 6 months to create. It is greater than in every way to Subcompact pieces (like this one). Snow Fall isn’t the first of these pieces. ESPN’s Doc Ellis story, The Verge and the work that Pitchfork are doing lately with their features are all coming from the same place.

Of course, these long intensive pieces are the stuff magazine journalism is based on. These publishers are just following in the footsteps of their predecessors.

Gay Talese, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. (Esquire, April 1966)
Hunter S. Thompson, The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved. (Scanlan’s Monthly, June 1970)
Neal Stephenson, Mother Earth, Mother Board: Wiring the Planet. (Wired, December 1996)
David Foster Wallace, Consider the Lobster. (Gourmet Magazine, August 2004).

We stand on the shoulders of giants.

There seem to be 2 separate but related currents running in publishing right now, minimlaists and maximalists. Subcompact Publishing meet Epic Storytelling.

Epic Storytelling is a designed experience.

Epic Storytelling is about bringing significant resources to bear to tell a story. It requires specialists bringing their craft to it for it to happen.

Epic Storytelling is bespoke.

It is not (at least right now) system driven. As NY Times Design Director Andrew Kueneman: said in the Atlantic Wire

“This story was not produced in our normal CMS, which is probably pretty obvious.”

There are attempts to create publishing systems that can create Epic Stories systematically, (The Atavist) but these are in their infancy.

Epic Storytelling requires the reader to focus.

It is not lightweight for the creator or the reader. Epic Storytelling wants your attention in a way that is different than Subcompact. Both require focus but Subcompact enables focus by removing cruft, making reading easier. Epic Storytelling rewards those readers who give it focus.

Epic Storytelling is an art, not a science.

Buzzfeed and HuffPo turned writing into a science, the science of optimizing clicks and headline writing. A/B the piece into existence. Epic Storytelling creates a splendid artifact. One, that is what it is, not optimized for page views but optimized for experience.

Epic Storytelling is considered.

Given the resources required to make these pieces, they need to follow a considered process. One that is well suited for large editorial organizations. The exact qualities that impede them in the Subcompact world, help them in the Epic world.

I see these two worlds not as opposite ends of a spectrum but rather a Venn diagram overlapping. They share as many qualities as they don’t. I believe that they can co-exist in the world quite nicely. At times each will be envious of the other, for one’s strengths are often the other’s weakness.

Maybe the best publications are equally adept at both and that is where the future lies.

History

In September of 2008, one of our designers, Greg Washington, began discussing a frustration he had. When starting any design project he would assemble a collection of images. These images are the foundational design research he would do before opening Photoshop or sketching. Over years of projects he collected dozens of folders of loose images on his hard drive.

Most designers maintain private collections of visual inspiration and research to fuel their creative process. Their typical workflow involved going out on the Web and downloading images to a local folder. There these images would sit with a bunch of other badly named files like img4065.jpg and fre566ba01.tif. If highly motivated, designers might bring those images into another program like Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop or Keynote to create a “moodboard”. These files—both the individual files and the moodboards—might get printed once, or thrown into the depths of a server only to be lost.

Greg was looking for an easier way to find, organize and store images that would serve as creative inspiration. He wanted to be able to easily share these images and see what other designers were using as inspiration. He wanted to be able to network those folders that he knew were sitting on everyone’s computers.

We loved the idea and decided to put some effort behind building a site that could do this. Through October, November and December of 2008 about 4 people worked on a site that we called Image Spark. It launched in January of 2009.

As of December 2012 Image Spark has over 1,152,487 images, 21,996 moodboards and 48,947 user accounts. It had 155,339 visits last month, 89,816 of which were unique. Those users generated some 968,057 page views.

In 2012, it had over 1.1 million unique visitors viewing almost 9 million pages.

So why are we considering shutting it down?

How 37Signals made us all believe

In 2008, when we were building Image Spark, we discussed, how we could commercialize it. We discussed different business models, including display advertising, premium features and membership. We thought we had an idea that could be commercially viable. But how would we know what to invest in it? Should we pull people off client work? Should we take some of the cash we had saved as a business and hire additional people?

We convinced ourselves that we would know very quickly whether it was successful or not. People would either love it or they wouldn’t. The “people” would tell us. Usage would give us evidence about whether to put more resources into it. In retrospect, this seems insanse. The “Field of Dreams” approach to product development… build it and they will come. Why did we believe 6 weeks after launch we would know whether to sacrifice part of our services business for Image Spark? Because 37Signals made us believe it was possible.

37Signals was the worst thing to happen to services businesses trying to make products. They fucked it up for all of us, because they made it. For those of us old enough to remember, 37Signals was a services company like Teehan+Lax. They had clients and did work for hire. Of course, 37signals isn’t a services company anymore. They make amazing digital products and their success is enviable.

What’s more enviable is how they made the transition from services to products. They seemingly did it with very little disruption. One day they had clients, the next day they were running Basecamp. Cash started rolling in.

The great lie, agencies tell themselves is that it can be done. You can make the transition. Look, 37Signals did it. So can we. Image Spark might have been our Basecamp. Several years later, a startup called Pinterest proved there was a business in image sharing. Why wasn’t that us?

Let me explain why, I think, 37Signals were able to do it and why we failed with Image Spark.

Clayton Christensen, the father of disruptive innovation, says, “you can’t start a disruptive business from inside an incumbent one.” The incumbent business will always take the resources from the disruptive one. He argues that if you want to create a disruptive business you need to isolate it from the incumbent business. The disruptive business needs its own values, processes and resources to be successful.

In our example, the incumbent business, Teehan+Lax, which gets its revenue from charging clients, was too powerful for Image Spark. As soon as Image Spark launched, the people who worked on it (the resources) went right back on to the work that paid the bills. In the spring, Greg (a driving force behind Image Spark) left for an opportunity on the west coast. Image Spark became the Christmas toy that sat neglected in the corner.

So how did 37Signals do it? Basecamp was a project management tool that 37Signals was using to manage their clients.

“We built Basecamp because we needed it. I’m a big believer in investing in what you know and what you need. We invested our time, energy, and focus into building a product that we knew we needed to run our own business. When you build what you know, and when you use what you build, you’ve got a head start on delivering a breakout product.” [source]

Basecamp got the resources (capital and human) it needed because it fueled the incumbent services business of 37Signals. It was able to take root because it wasn’t disruptive but highly complimentary.

This allowed them to mature a product and then realize, “hey others might like this”. This is why, I believe, 37Signals succeeded in their transition, and most agencies will fail.

Image Spark had some complimentary aspects but it wasn’t like its existence was crucial to Teehan+Lax’s services business. After we launched we got positive response from the design community, but not enough to gather the evidence we would need to invest heavily in it.

This is actually what happens with most products. They are rarely complete failures nor are they complete successes. They limp into the world on launch and then the real work starts. The real work of maturing and scaling.

Image Spark dies a horrible death and becomes a zombie

We did the worst thing you can do for a product: we left it alone. Over the past 3 years we’ve made only a few incremental updates to Image Spark, all on the backend. We moved it over to AWS from a dedicated server and then later re-engineered the database to improve performance.

There was never enough evidence that we should invest in it and so we just left it out there. It cost relatively little to keep open (about $2500 in server costs) and some people use it. But the product has become, what Joe Olsen at Phenomblue calls, “a ‘zombie idea’ not dead, yet not alive either.”

Image Spark is our zombie and now we need to decide whether to kill it.

In December, MongoHQ informed us that our database requirements have grown to such a size that we need to upgrade to a Large server. Our AWS bill, while not huge, is getting larger not smaller. Next year, we estimate Image Spark will cost us about $9,000.

We aren’t sure it’s worth it.

What do we do now?

We are faced with a decision about the future of Image Spark. It has become this zombie walking through our business. A small asset is growing into a increasing liability.

Stock investors use a simple model for making investment decisions… buy, sell or hold.

We adapted that model to make investment decisions in our business.

Improve – Invest the required resources to improve the product so that it is valuable to users.
Maintain – Do nothing more than is required to keep it alive
Kill – Shut’er down
Sell – Can someone else find value in what’s been built?

Right now, Image Spark is on the kill list. We aren’t interested in maintaining it, finding a buyer and negotiating a sale feels like a distraction. Improving it, means diverting resources from money making activities to Image Spark which in a post-Pinterest world seems foolish.

We’d be interested to know from you, what do you think we should we do with Image Spark?

Zombie Photo Credit: e_monk

UPDATE: If we decide to close Image Spark, we will provide an export function and time for people to get their images. We wouldn’t leave you hanging.

10 years ago today, Geoff and I started this company. The two of us and one employee, a designer who previously worked with us at Modem Media, started that first day in an office we shared with another design firm. Today we are over 40 people in our own office.

All of this is a happy accident. It’s not by design but by a series of small decisions that lead us here 10 years later. Like most entrepreneurs, we’re making this up as we go along.

Over 10 years, each of those small decisions amass and form something approximating knowledge. Even though no one asked for it, I thought I would pass on the sum total of what we’ve learned running a business over the past 10 years. I wrote 10 of them, just for the symmetry of it all, but each point has got us through the first 10 years.

1) Your only job is to be unique
The last thing the world needs is another digital agency. Since we started we’ve always tried to be unique. Whenever a new client comes in, we ask ourselves “why are we uniquely qualified to do this work?”. We always want to be able to answer that question, honestly.

2) Trust your instincts
Learn to listen to your instincts, if something seems wrong, it probably is. Conversely, if something seems right go for it. People try to look for evidence or data to support decisions but understand there is no data about the future. Over time you get better at listening to and trusting those instincts. It takes time but is one of the best tools you have.

3) It’s all about the work
There is no magic to this business. If you do good work, you get good work.

4) Being big is primarily about ego
We could be a much larger company, but why? We believe that growth and scale is only necessary if the work demands it. Some work needs 100 people on it (most doesn’t). Many companies grow because their ego demands it. Being big comes with a some advantages (mainly financial) but for us, we haven’t figured out how to be big and maintain rule #3.

5) Figure out your values
I used to dismiss things like “corporate values” as bullshit. But about 2 years ago we sat down and went through an exercise of understanding and writing down our values. It was one of the best things we’ve done. By understanding our core values we look at our decisions and see if they are true to the things we hold dear. It is the clearest way we’ve found to validate instinctual decisions (see rule #2). I recommend using Dave Logan’s Mountains and Valleys exercise.

6) Create more value than you capture
This is Tim O’Reilly’s mantra and one we believe in. If you read our blog you know that we share everything. If you’ve heard us speak, we try and be brutally honest. We share code, we share our tools. This sharing resulted in 1.2 million visitors to our site YTD.

7) Be prepared to change your mind
Just because you did something one way yesterday does not mean it’s the right way to do something tomorrow. When Geoff and I first started we used to believe that if someone left the company, we wouldn’t hire them back. We were so personally hurt that we would excommunicate them. We realized over time this was stupid. We’ve welcomed back several alumni and we’re really glad we did. Over time you change and grow, keep your values but be prepared to change your tactics.

8) Learn to say no
I can’t explain it but when you say “no”, new possibilities appear. Don’t ask me why but it works. Saying no, gives you focus and makes you unique. You can’t be great at everything. Pick what you are great at and say no to everything else.

9) Slow down
Because we exist in this real time world we feel we need to respond to everything in real time. Some of the biggest mistakes we’ve made are because we reacted too quickly to something. Learning to slow down or even ignoring certain things is a really important skill. There are times when responding quickly and decisively is important but, in general, slowing down is a good thing.

10) You can make enough money but you can never have enough reputation
This is a line I stole from Warren Buffet and I love it. If you pursue reputation, profits follow.

The fact that we are here 10 years on is because, over that time, we’ve worked with clients who have trusted us with their brands, their customers and their businesses. Thank you to all our clients past and present.

Geoff and I could not have done this without all the people who have been part of this ride. To all the T+Lers, both past and present, thank you for bringing your best to work every day, sticking with us when we didn’t always know what we were doing and being part of making this thing work.

This week 4 of our co-workers are in Cannes for the 59th International Festival of Creativity. But what makes this special is that all 4 earned their way to Cannes by winning young creative competitions.

Paul Reiss and Mustafa Al-Qinneh (left) are representing Canada in the Young Lions Cyber Competition

Laurel Cole and Chris Tanner (right) won the National Advertising Awards.

Good luck to Paul and Mustafa. Chris and Laurel, don’t drink too much.

Readability is Retina ready and available NOW in the App Store.

Click to view full size

Click to view full size

Get it for iOS (iPad/iPhone/iPod)

Follow Teehan+Lax and Readability on Twitter.

Yesterday marked our 9th year in business. Every year I write an anniversary post (8,7,6) and try to reflect on where we are at and what we have learned over past year.

After 9 years we have made the transition from a start up to an established business. So much of our identity was wrapped up in the idea of us being a scrappy upstart that it is tough to admit we aren’t that anymore. This past year we came to terms with this fact.

The company we are today is interested in, and capable of, taking on much larger challenges. We spent a lot of time this year thinking about where the digital channel is going over the next 2-5 years and we are shaping ourselves towards that.

As Bob Marley says, “in this great future you can’t forget your past”. We can’t change without remembering what got us here.

When Geoff and I started this company it was because we wanted to do great work. We didn’t want to become Creative Directors who were abstracted from the work. We wanted to be creating the work. So we built a company that allowed us to do that. That still is at the heart of this company. As Geoff says “great artists ship” and that is something we hold very dear. We love creating epic work. We love it when other companies create great work.

A lot of you have probably used our various PSDs. We get a lot of thanks from the community of developers and designers for these tools. I often respond to these thanks with “You’re welcome – Now go make epic shit”. Colloquialism aside, it is ultimately what I think, we are all in this business to do.

So after 9 years I need to thank the clients who give us the opportunity to do great work for them and their users. I need to thank all the people, past and present, who have worked here to get us to 9 years. Happy birthday to us.

Earlier this year we were working on an update for our iPad app TweetMag. We were having some issues with how the app was retrieving content. Since we were using Readability’s API we thought we would send them an email and see if they had any suggestions. They responded immediately and within 24 hours we had solved a major technical problem that had plagued us for months.

That initial email led to them giving us some amazing support on TweetMag, which led to meeting at SXSW 2011, which led to conversations, which leads me to this blog post.

We are very excited to announce that we (Teehan+Lax) are partnering with Readability.

Truth be told we’ve already been working together for several months on some upcoming Readability releases. We’re just now ready to talk about it.

Why did we do this?
1) When we worked together on TweetMag we just slipped into an effortless collaboration that felt right. This is when design is at its best. We were both passionate about making the product as good as it could be.

We have incredible mutual respect for what we each do, they respect our design/UX skills, and we are in awe of their technical skills. This lets us focus on what we are each great at and then work towards a common goal.

2) When Rich began discussing his vision for Readability we had a lot of ideas of how we could help him realize it. Ultimately, thinking about how we interact with content online is such a fascinating problem to solve, we jumped at the chance to work on it.

What are we doing?
At a high level we’re designing new products and features for Readability. We’re also involved in the product roadmap and vision.

When can we see what you’ve been working on?
Soon and it is quite awesome.

What are the terms of your deal?
We believe so much in Readability we’ve invested both our time and our money in the company.

We just wanted to let everyone know that we are very excited with this venture. Not since Rush toured with Kiss have Canada and America come together in such an awesome way.

You can find this cross posted on Readability’s blog