We cut the manifesto before we built it

There was going to be a manifesto. A card, posted every so often, stating what the studio believes in. It was planned, it had a slot in the schedule, and it was ready to be built. We cut it in late July, before a single one went out.

A brand that has to announce its values probably isn’t practising them

Our tagline is “Radically real.” The trouble with a card that says so is that it’s a card that says so. If everything else we make is honest (a tip that genuinely works, a price with nothing dressed up in it, an admission when something didn’t go well), then the slogan is redundant. And if it isn’t honest, the slogan is just a lie in nice typography. Either way the card earns nothing.

We looked at the bigger version too, the one with real faces and a proper campaign behind it. Two problems there. There’s no budget for it yet. And the cheap way round that (generating the people) would have meant a studio built on being real running adverts full of humans who don’t exist. That one wasn’t a close call.

What was already there

The homepage has a section on where the name comes from. 人間, a human being. 人気, well-liked. 気, the quiet energy sitting inside the first one. That is the values page, and it’s been there since the day the site went up. Building a second one would have been saying the same thing again, louder.

So the share that was set aside for talking about ourselves went to the useful things instead, from sixty percent of what we publish up to seventy. In practice that means roughly one in ten things you would have got from us was going to be a statement about who we are. Now it’s a tip, an honest read on a tool, or something else you can actually put to work.

We’d rather show you than tell you. That’s the whole of it.