You’re reading Kindling, a weekly newsletter from Wildfire sharing insights from the world of branding and design.

A thought from me

This week, I heard from a couple business partners who approached me about branding their new media agency.

The first thing we talked about was the name.

A bad name can really hurt your company’s chances of success. You won’t notice at first. Over years, the issues will compound. But over time, your name will become harder to change. So it’s important to get it right.

Pretend you’re starting your own dairy company. Many business owners and entrepreneurs I know would be cheekily tempted to call it Dairy Co. The problem is, Dairy Co. is not a memorable name. It’s a description, and a forgettable one at that. Especially if your competitors call themselves Yoghurt Co. and Milk Co.

But consider different directions. Names like Yohey and Milkay sound ridiculous when you first encounter them. They test poorly among focus groups. But as names, they become more memorable culturally. Yohey can become a household name. There are infinite advertising opportunities and taglines one could use for it. It sounds friendly, endearing, slightly funny, and approachable in a way dairy products often wish they could be (see the “got milk?” campaign).

In Canada, there was a bank called ING Direct. They were a successful bank, but they failed every metric you could come up with for a good brand name test. Lexicon changed the name to Tangerine, and Concrete designed the new visual identity. (You can see the ING Direct’s previous branding in this Toronto Star article.) The rebranding, along with a massive advertising spend and a referral bonus for trying Tangerine, resulted in deposits increasing by over $3 billion in just a couple years. (Anecdotally, there was a point around 2018 when seemingly everybody in Toronto had a Tangerine account — thanks to their generous referral program and playful advertising.)

ING Direct was not cool. While the rename was reportedly driven by a legal situation, the new name and branding made Tangerine seem like a fun, hip, youthful bank. And it clearly made a difference.

A good, memorable name is not a guarantee of success, but it sure doesn’t hurt your chances.

A bad name, on the other hand…

Things worth sharing

1. Dan Mall writes about the benefits in approaching your brand the long, hard, stupid way.
2. Polaroid’s latest ad campaign is very smart, blending fears of modernity with their trademark vintage aesthetic.
3. Base Design gave Ray’s, a local Alaskan restaurant, the sort of branding treatment typically reserved for million-dollar businesses. It’s gorgeous and extremely fun..

A question to ponder

If your business already has a name, but you resonated with this week’s thought, you might be left wondering if you should rename the company. If your name truly is terrible, and you think you could gain a lot with a rename, you need to consider the cost as well. It’s not just financial. Your SEO and AEO will take a hit as you start from scratch, and you’ll need to build up all your existing domain authority again on the internet. In this position, the question to ask yourself is simple: is it worth it?

Until next week,

Nathan

What you should do next…

1. For more insights like this, subscribe to the weekly Kindling newsletter.
2. To see people walk the talk, explore my case studies.
3. Schedule a free call to review your brand and website. Get a one hour consultation where we discuss your brand, your current marketing problems, and potential next steps. If you’re not ready to work with me, I won’t attempt to sell you, but I’ll point you to the right next step.

On its own, a logo means nothing. It doesn’t attain meaning until three things are true:

1. It identifies. A good logo identifies; it doesn’t explain. Nothing about the Apple logo suggests they sell computers. Nothing about the Golden Arches suggests that McDonald’s sells burgers. These logos simply identify the company, repeatedly, everywhere.
2. It’s unique. If you can change out the name beside the logo for your competitor’s, the logo isn’t yours yet.
3. It’s memorable. People might not be able to draw it (most people can’t draw, and who can draw the Starbucks logo anyway?), but they should be able to recall it.

The logo attains meaning only if those three things are achieved. The logo isn’t a brand, but a bad logo sometimes indicates a deeper brand problem. And a brand problem is really a self-identity problem.

It’s not merely an identity problem for your business. It’s an identity problem for your audience. They identify themselves with your brand, and may take pride in being the sort of person who associates with you.

If your logo doesn’t identify you, isn’t unique, and isn’t memorable, you might need clarity on who you are, where you’re going, and what you’re saying to customers along the way.

A rebrand is psychological, not corporate.

Things worth sharing

1. Shortly after Sam wrote about thoughts and feelings around Claude Design and encouraged Figma and Sketch to think differently about the purpose of their tools, Figma announced shader fills, motion animation, and more at Config 2026. (Funny timing.)
2. I love the brand work How & How has done for Bristol Dockyards.
3. New to me, but not totally new: Tofu’s 2022 rebrand of the Tokyo National Museum is excellent.
4. Illustrated and interactive illustrations explaining how everyday products work.

A question to ponder

Your website has to achieve a business goal. Having a lot of traffic or great engagement without financial results is a business failure disguised as a success metric. So what do you need? More leads? More sales? More users? What’s the one business metric you can focus on to make your site better?

Until next week,

Nathan

What you should do next…

1. For more insights like this, subscribe to the weekly Kindling newsletter.
2. To see people walk the talk, explore my case studies.
3. Schedule a free call to review your brand and website. Get a one hour consultation where we discuss your brand, your current marketing problems, and potential next steps. If you’re not ready to work with me, I won’t attempt to sell you, but I’ll point you to the right next step.

If you are identifying the difficult thing you do, you need to know that there are two kinds of hard things:

1. The difficult things that your competitors do.
2. The difficult thing only you can do.

On difficult thing your competitors do: If you’re considering doing a difficult thing that your competitors already do, then you’ve lost. Yes, these things are hard to do, and it’s tempting for you to do them. After all, you want to keep up with your competition. But if you succeed, you have expended a lot of effort, only to become undifferentiated.

On difficult thing only you can do: First, it’s hard to identify what this thing is. This is the whole point of a brand identity process, though. A great brand should be able to answer “the only blank that does blank.” Do you know how you would fill in those blanks?

If you identify the difficult thing only you can do, the temptation there is to pretend you don’t need to do it. After all, it’s hard. But people pay more for difficult things. If you can’t find the hard thing only you can do, you will never have more than middling success.

On change: The world can still throw you a curveball. Sometimes things change, and a hard thing becomes easy. Typesetting became trivial once the Mac democratized publishing. Digital photo editing rendered darkrooms antiquities. LLMs make programming substantially easier.

If your hard thing is no longer hard, you need to find a new hard thing, lest you become irrelevant. That hard thing can be similar to your old thing, but with a new pitch. You can move upstream (with less customer volume) or downstream (with more customer volume). You can change your business model to something more difficult to achieve, narrow your niche (like those infamous COBOL engineers), or change industries altogether.

But your brand can’t stay still. You must embrace what only you can do. Fill in your “only” blanks. By necessity, this means you will do something that hasn’t been done before. Or you’ll do a known thing the way nobody else does.

The world needs more people and organizations with the courage to do new, hard things.

Things worth sharing

1. A rabbit hole worth learning from: the history of Japan’s largest whisky brand.
2. From Cory Doctorow: The AI bubble is different from the internet bubble.
3. A new guitar company from the co-founder of Studio Neat: Offkilter Guitars has a nice website (rare), a surprising body shape (also rare), and a great pitch (very rare). I’m a fan.

A question to ponder

Do you think the hard thing you do will still be hard in ten years? If it won’t be, what are you doing about your positioning today?

Until next week,

Nathan

PS. After we make the move to Nevada…

What you should do next…

1. For more insights like this, subscribe to the weekly Kindling newsletter.
2. To see people walk the talk, explore my case studies.
3. Schedule a free call to review your brand and website. Get a one hour consultation where we discuss your brand, your current marketing problems, and potential next steps. If you’re not ready to work with somebody like me, I won’t even attempt to sell you.

Obviously, both the client and I were disappointed. Nobody likes to shelve good work. Shelved work doesn’t end up earning the client any money, and it doesn’t end up in anybody’s portfolio.

But shelving the project was the right call. This was a year-long initiative. The client would have to put the initial campaign on repeat for at least a year to get the results they wanted. They had a clear path to making it work for the first month. But after that, it wasn’t clear who in the organization was going to have time to take on the work.

Consistency is hard to sustain. When the bill comes due, you pay it with trust. Trust is far harder to earn than money. Earning trust requires showing up. You don’t get to skip days and stay in the game. We’re talking about practice.. Practice is the game, and if your brand doesn’t show up, every single time, and practice in public, you’re going to lose.

I saw a different brand fail the consistency test earlier this week when I received their newsletter in my email. Typically, this brand emails me every week, and always on the same day of the week. But this email came on the wrong day, and I realized after receiving it that it was the first email I’d had from them in over a month.

I normally read this brand’s newsletters pretty carefully. This time, I just deleted it.

If a project requires consistency in output, and you can’t prioritize it and make it predictable, it will ironically cost you customers. Every missed newsletter erodes a bit of trust in your brand.

Starting something like a newsletter is easy. Keeping it up is the hard, important work of building trust.

Things worth sharing

1. Ethan Marcotte, who coined the term responsive web design, has redesigned his personal site. I always enjoy his work.
2. The world’s number one site about shoelaces is the resource about tying foot knots you didn’t know you needed, preserved in a website that is both frequently updated and frozen in time.
3. Microsoft is working hard to pivot on the Xbox brand. After a decade and a half of poor decision making, they’re making some hard choices now. They have a new CEO, revised branding (XBOX instead of Xbox, and I will not write it in all caps), a revised strategy on Game Pass and exclusive games, and they’ve slashed the price of Game Pass, their core service offering. In Steve Jobs style, they’re being unusually public about the challenges they face. That makes for great commentary. Keep an eye on this space. The squandering of the Xbox brand has been frankly unbelievable since its highs in the late 2000s, and it’s interesting to learn from their mistakes and observe their damage control.

A question to ponder

If you were to start from scratch with your brand, what would you do differently? And why won’t you do that now?

Until next week,

Nathan

P.S. Would you like to set Google Chrome as your default browser, or would you prefer centuries of untold pain and torment?

What you should do next…

1. For more insights like this, subscribe to the weekly Kindling newsletter.
2. To see people walk the talk, explore my case studies.
3. Schedule a free call to review your brand and website. Get a one hour consultation where we discuss your brand, your current marketing problems, and potential next steps. If you’re not ready to work with me, I won’t even attempt to sell you.

I don’t remember a lot of people from my high school. Of course, I remember my high school girlfriend, and I remember the other guy who wanted to date her. I remember the prettiest girl in school. And I remember the weirdest girl and the weirdest guy. The weirdest guy had a cone mohawk and orange hair, and was the only teenager I knew with a PowerBook. The weirdest girl dyed her hair purple and superglued it all so it pointed straight up, and didn’t realize her mistake until after the fact. (It became her signature look.)

The girl with the purple hair was gifted with auto repair and knew exactly what she wanted out of life. She had more clarity than the rest of us. The boy was, for a high schooler in the early 2000s, practically prescient: he felt technology should only empower people, he was wary that we were building our own prisons unless we could seize the technology for ourselves, and he built canoes and other woodworking projects as a release.

Being different earned my attention. The substance underneath is why I remember it.

Substance without attention is irrelevant. Attention without substance is noise.

Doing what people expect your organization to do, following every standard and tradition, in an effort to avoid rocking the boat is a great way to make sure your brand is palatable, forgettable, and ultimately invisible in a sea of do-alikes.

If you have something unique and substantial to offer, you need to look different enough to get attention. Once you get attention, you can share your good news. Find your purple hair or your mohawk and wear them with pride.

Things worth sharing

1. While some of today’s filmmakers are reportedly embracing AI for storyboarding, Akira Kurosawa’s spectacular hand-painted storyboards are a reminder that even the earliest parts of the creative process can be filled with a sense of humanity and splendour.
2. Sharp Type’s new Ghost superfamily is a monumentally massive type release, complete with four variable axes that support optical size, weight, slant, and how monospaced the type is. An incredible release.
3. How niche is too niche? Dan Mall shares the math on identifying your potential target market.
4. As LLMs get better at craft, what’s left? Naz Hamid argues that craft is not culture, and AI isn’t embedded in culture the way humans are.

A question to ponder

Sometimes, looking different is simply stating the opposite of the competition in your field. For example, I think hourly billing is a mistake, and I think LLMs will flatten creative work to average. What are your oppositional statements?

Until next week,

Nathan

What you should do next…

1. For more insights like this, subscribe to the weekly Kindling newsletter.
2. To see people walk the talk, explore my case studies.
3. Schedule a free call to review your brand and website. Get a one hour consultation where we discuss your brand, your current marketing problems, and potential next steps. If you’re not ready to work with somebody like me, I won’t even attempt to sell you.

There are a few reasons a rebranding, repositioning, or new website could go wrong. Assuming the agency or studio is good at their job, the most likely reasons for failure are simple:

1. You never got solidarity within your organization. Everybody needs to agree on the importance of the new brand, including and especially the president, founder, and CEO. And once everybody is on board, everybody needs to learn to speak the same language and learn how to talk about the brand and identity of the organization with a shared vocabulary. The brand is an organization-wide initiative, at all times, and the gap between “organizational alignment” and “organizational solidarity” is as large as the gap between wood framing and a concrete foundation. Solidarity requires participation, where alignment only requires agreement.
2. The rebranding or new website is an attempt to fix a different problem. A lot of organizations — nonprofits especially, but not exclusively — have Founderitis, which is what happens when the founder can’t imagine a company without them. In that case, the problem is succession planning, which involves a brand that relies less on the founder’s face and more on the organization itself. This is a political problem internally, and requires careful navigation. Sometimes, an outside voice can be just what you need. Sometimes, you’ll sadly need to wait it out. The easiest way to see if you have a path forward is to return to Number 1. Attempt to get solidarity and ongoing participation from the founder, not just alignment or agreement. For many founders at this level, it is too easy to say “yes” to something and pretend it doesn’t exist.
3. The identity was delivered, but never implemented. Most design studios and agencies wrap the project up after the logo is designed. Sometimes, that means you’re left holding a logo and some colours without any idea what to do with them. It’s important to get your designer to help with either the transition to your in-house team or assist with the remaining deliverables, and account for them in your budget and timeline. The work doesn’t end with the logo; it ends when the outside world sees that logo across all your materials.

The most difficult part of any rebranding is getting everybody on the same page. Getting all the stakeholders to agree on an identity and a direction, and helping your internal teams understand the new direction, is the lion’s share of the work.

The final identity design is usually the bottom 10% of the work. If a project went wrong, it’s somewhere in the top 90%.

Things worth sharing

1. “Data is a risk… Data is distracting… It becomes a job.” Is your organization collecting too much data? “Each morning at 10am, I get an email from Caroline in the finance team showing the cash we have in the bank compared with the same day last year. This fact offers no hiding place.”
2. Designers are trying to figure out how to use AI in their work. Harvard Design Magazine calls AI a design medium: “In the studio, this feels less like a revolution and more like a continuation, yet another material showing up on the table, just as disruptive as all the others—volatile, powerful, uneven, full of possibility. Something you do not just use. Something you work through.” (Simultaneously, Figma is rolling out their own design agent. I don’t have access yet, but I’m keeping an eye on this space.)
3. Google is transitioning from Google Search to an LLM. No more blue links. In the future, it’s all chatbot, all the time. But what happens to the ads?

A question to ponder

Your organization’s website might be getting fewer and fewer hits from search engine traffic. Soon, every website will be affected by these changes. How are you preparing for that sea change?

Until next week,

Nathan

PS. Ken had the dream job, and he threw it away.

Everyone you want as a client thinks an LLM can do your job. Unless your job’s only output is text, they’re probably wrong. But it doesn’t matter that they’re wrong, because now you have a Mistaken Identity Problem.

A Mistaken Identity Problem is what I call it when a shared cultural misunderstanding affects how people perceive you. In this case, people have mistaken your capabilities for that of a machine. They think the end results are the same. If a customer thinks they don’t need you, they won’t hire you. And no amount of “but they’re wrong!” messaging will change their minds.

All of your marketing needs to answer one question: why pay you instead of Claude? The AI might not be able to actually do your job, but that’s not relevant, because everybody thinks it can. Output alone is no longer your customers’ problem. You need to identify and speak to a new pain point.

Every information worker and every services business needs to adapt to survive the Mistaken Identity Problem. You have to articulate a new reason you exist — the real reason people hire you. Thanks to LLMs, output is cheap. You’re being mistaken for the machine.

If you don’t sell outputs anymore, what do you sell?

Things worth sharing

1. I fell in love with KIND this week. They’re massive and popular and are recognized as the best branding agency in the world. They’re new to me, though. Loved the work they did for Gyda, a premium snow crab brand.
2. Taken shows you what information browsers know about you and send to websites. From the same people: Since You Arrived shows you how the world has changed since you visited their website. And Discovered tells you about the history of the world beneath your feet.

A question to ponder

Mistaken Identity Problems can be made worse by industry peers reinforcing the wrong assumptions. One or more of your peers is unintentionally making the case for your replacement with an LLM. How can you use this to your advantage?

Until next week,

Nathan

PS. Karate is a job perk now.

Your brand’s logo shouldn’t be literal.

How many times have you seen a logo that directly resembles the product? A coffee shop whose logo is a coffee cup. A speaker company whose logo is a bookshelf speaker. A church whose logo is a cross. A yoga/massage/physio clinic whose logo is a leaf.

If your logo is predictable, people will think your brand is predictable too. And they’ll probably forget they ever saw your logo.

Nike adopted the swoosh logo in 1971. It didn’t have any semantic meaning until they started using the “Just Do It” slogan in 1988. It was just a mark that stood out on store shelves and advertising.

McDonald’s Golden Arches don’t resemble burgers. Burger King’s logo does. Guess who has a more valuable brand.

Things worth sharing

1. I loved the identity work Andrew Benjamin Morris did for Mindful Health.
2. Alex Smith posits a theory: with the advent of AI, there is more content on the internet than there are eyeballs. But he has solutions.

A question to ponder

What do your competitors not do?

Until next week,

Nathan

PS. The expectations were too high.

You’ll notice a new format this week. Studio Missives are now Kindling: the ideas that spark a wildfire. Each issue now includes something I’m thinking about related to my strategy-led design work, a few links worth sharing, and a question that might challenge the existing thinking around your brand.

The name is changing, but the numbers continue from where I left off with Studio Missives. Let’s jump into Kindling 36.

A thought from me

A popular brand exercise is to ask leaders to sketch out what they want their business to look like in five, ten, fifteen, and twenty years.

A better exercise might be to ask what the possible threats will appear in that timeframe.

As humans, we’re bad at predicting the future. Nobody outside of a few upstarts in the late 70s saw the rise of the personal computer. Nobody in 2019 thought that chatbots would become a part of our daily lives. Change will come, and it will shrink the moat around your business.

Write down some of the threats of the next twenty years: new technologies, global pandemics, geopolitical shifts, and labour trends. How will your brand defend against these shrinking moats?

Things worth sharing

1. GT’s website for their new typeface, GT Meckanik, is fantastic.
2. The Brazilian Amazon was given a bold new rebrand.
3. Mat Marquis writes at Piccalilli about the end of responsive images. This is a fantastic CSS update that’s going to make the web better for everybody.
4. Craig Mod thoughtfully writes about what an iPad could be if it were truly a product that sat between the Mac and the iPhone.

A question to ponder

When was the last time you asked an employee to describe your brand back to you in their own words, and were you comfortable with what you heard?

Until next week,

Nathan

PS. If only there were an AI standard.

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening in the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

I’ve spent the week digging deep into brand strategy and type aesthetics.

1. I’ve been studying the design behind some quirky brands. I’ve been looking into this for a client. (More on that in a future week.) There’s Nice (canned wine and fun colours!), Popina (a now-closed restaurant), Apron (payment software), and Mutt (dog food branded as pet wellness). Fun stuff!
2. That led me down a rabbit hole to Typeeverything, who makes a lot of these quirky typefaces. I really like Crunch, Newsagent, and Champ, but they are all awesome. I downloaded every single trial typeface and tried them all with my own studio name and all my clients’ names. It was a fun way to spend a couple hours.
3. I’ve done a lot of paper reading this week. The Win Without Pitching Manifesto and The Brand Gap are both remarkable, short reads that I can’t recommend highly enough. Both of them should be reread with some frequency, and they are reshaping how I think about the studio. (Up next are The Brand Flip, Zag, and Creative Strategy and the Business of Design.)

What are you working on?

This week, I designed four stylescapes for a client. (I hope I can share them here next week, after the client has seen them.)

I do stylescapes differently from most agencies or designers. Most of them treat stylescapes as art-directed mood boards. It’s other people’s imagery, pictures, and typography placed carefully in a panorama designed to evoke the feeling of a brand.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s hard to envision yourself in a mood board. So I always start with my design references and then make my own takes on them. These are three (or more) design directions that a client will pick their favourite elements from, so even if I’m directly stealing ideas, none of them will make it into the finished product as is.

This takes a bit more time than a traditional stylescape, but I find the results are meaningfully better. By placing the client’s own brand name into these designs, and using the words they use, they can see themselves in that brand much more easily than they would if they looked at a mood board. It becomes easier to see the future, for them, and note how it all comes back to their brand strategy.

This week, as I assembled these four stylescapes, I remembered the importance of type in logo design. Logo comes from the Greek logos, which literally means “word.” Logo and word are one and the same. Therefore, in branding, the word is the logo, and the logo is the word. Your name must be memorable, and the typography of that mark must be memorable with it, because otherwise it will be forgotten.

And just like graphic and web design, it all comes back to typography.

Until next week,

Nathan

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening at the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

1. Why are so many control rooms seafoam green? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but don’t skip the comments on this one. Some interesting additional insights and links there too. For example, surgical scrubs are green too.
2. Some interesting typefaces this week. I love Ratch, which has stylistic alternates that would be really useful for word marks. Matthijs Herzberg is drawing a font every couple days and sharing it on his Mastodon account. I loved this one in particular.
3. Like everybody, I am amazed by the photos NASA is getting from the moon. So many of the photos are incredible, but this shot of the moon eclipsing the sun took my breath away. I also love this photo of the moon with the earth beyond it. A sort of reverse perspective, if you will. A lot of folks have shared their own takes on these photos that I enjoyed. Jason Kottke shared some great phone wallpapers. Federico Viticci made a shortcut that rotates through desktop photos from NASA’s Artemis II collection for iOS and macOS. Finally, Petapixel analyzed why the 10 year old Nikon D5 is the best camera for Artemis II.
4. Dan Mall organized a summit for agency owners in Belize. He organized multi-hour hot seats, got incredible service, and the whole crew got to experience a place where Francis Ford Coppola went to retreat. I’d love to be a part of something as intense as this.

What are you working on?

This week, I led a lunch and learn of sorts about branding. It’s an introduction to the topic for a group of small business owners. I’m sharing what branding is, along with some exercises they can do to identify what their branding is currently doing. Branding is counterintuitive. A brand isn’t just a logo. If I’m honest, it’s not a logo at all. The logo is a small piece. A brand is how a customer feels about a product, service, or organization. It’s a feeling, not an aesthetic (although they inform one another).

The awkward truth is this: nobody cares about your logo. But they might align with your identity.

Your brand is what your customers decide it is, and since it’s about feelings, every customer might experience a slightly different version of your brand. The brand is a living thing. You can change the visual elements of the brand with the times. But the brand identity should reflect the brand’s personality. They have to match.

A brand identity is a rhetorical device you can use to persuade the public to see your organization as who it is.

Bad branding isn’t about a logo; it’s about a mismatch between customer perception and the reality of an organization. If you get the identity wrong, you can’t fix the brand without throwing it out and restarting.

As simply as possible, if your organization were a person, the brand is their entire self projected aesthetically, so that people immediately identify and recognize themselves in it.

There’s an episode of Netflix’s Abstract: The Art of Design that focuses on graphic designer Paula Scher’s work at Pentagram. (You can watch the whole episode on YouTube.)The episode spends a small portion of its time discussing Paula’s work on The Public Theater. She says something interesting:

I started trying to create a process in the identities I make where I go back and revisit them in five or ten years, because sometimes they need tweaking. It’s hard to make a guess, so you want to design something that can be adapted to its time. I’ve redesigned The Public Theater logo three times and nobody even knows it. I’ve tightened it up, moved it apart, changed the font. I’ve had a love affair with The Public Theatre.

(If the embedded content above does not display in your feed reader, visit the link.)

When Paula designed the new identity for The Public, she made it possible for The Public Theater and New York City to find common ground. The Public looked like a New Yorker, talked like a New Yorker, and behaved like a New Yorker. It changed the public’s perception from “those artsy theatre people” to “one of us.” But it wasn’t because of the logo itself. It was because the logo identified The Public Theater as a New Yorker.

A brand is a way of identifying who you are and who your people are. As Seth Godin says, “people like us do things like this.”

You are more than your outfits. Your brand is more than your logo.

Until next week,

Nathan

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening in the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

1. Sam Henri’s post about the MacBook Neo has been making the rounds. Reading it, I was reminded of the profound joy I had as a child and teenager of pushing the boundaries with the tools I had. I remembered trying to draw logos for the publishing company I wanted to start (so I could publish the books I wanted to write), and trying to figure out how to get the computer to bend to my will. (I also remember writing complete books, actual several-hundred-page-long fantasy tomes, which will never see the light of day.) Sam’s essay is tremendous. I was thinking about it earlier this week, when I had InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, and a few hundred browser tabs open. I was flitting between all of them, working on the task at hand, and saw that my MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM had suddenly used up 50GB of swap, and realized that I really should have bought the 128GB model. Then I grinned, because I saw the edges of the machine, and felt the boundaries, and thought of Sam’s essay. “The reviews can tell you what a computer is for. They have very little interest in what you might become because of one.”
2. A couple really cool and highly interactive websites this week. Sleep Well Creative explains the benefits of sleep for creative work. A Journey Through Infertility is an interactive story about IVF told from the perspective of the parent and the child.
3. Love the custom typeface Grill Type made for Adyen, which is really lovely work.
4. It’s very interesting to me to see what Canva thinks the design trends of 2026 will be. This was published in December, but new to me, so I’ll be curious to see if they’re right. (A lot of these “trends” just seem like good design elements one could use on any project.)

What are you working on?

I love this time of year. Specifically, I love Daylight Savings Time. The sun stays out later, and crucially, begins to rise earlier as well.

In the summer, I can work out when I wake up, because the sun rises at 5am and my body has already been exposed to light even while I’ve been asleep. In the winter, the sun rises shortly after I do, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t successfully work out in the mornings. I need at least three or four hours of sunlight before my body performs well in the gym.

But I love a morning workout. It clears my mind in a way coffee does not. On sunny days (which have been frustratingly infrequent thanks to a chronic crap ton of rain), I can work out in the morning and start my day off right for the first time since late October. Since I bought my rowing machine and started rowing two years ago (I can’t believe it’s been two years), the act of rowing has become as critical a part of my process as any of the work itself.

I was thinking about this today because the critical job of a designer (and probably most self-motivated professions) is to fall in love with the process. Designers talk a lot about “design thinking” and “design process” because we like the idea that creativity can be organized. It’s something we can blame our failures and claim our successes on. It’s also the only way to stay sane in an open-ended creative project.

But you must leave room for experimentation.

This was a week of experimentation, and the messy middle. I am in the middle of several processes right now. Processes I would love to fast forward through. But there is no fast or easy path forward, most of the time.

I continue to collect and amass inspiration for MHBC’s stylescape. (If you’re new here, Mount Hamilton Baptist Church is a local church — the church I attend — and they asked if I would help them rebrand and redesign their website. I agreed to do it, on condition I could make a multi-part YouTube documentary about the process.) I have started working on logo directions and textures and colours for the stylescapes, although I feel like I am swimming in it right now. The messy middle is called such for a reason.

Inspired by Paul Thomas Anderson’s screen tests for Phantom Thread, I have rearranged my studio two or three times this week while filming test footage for the B‑roll for the MHBC documentary. I have reviewed that footage, considered it. Tested different lighting. Tested different camera angles. Considered each and every option at my disposal. Thanks to that work, I now have two sets. (I do not have as many options as Paul Thomas Anderson, which is both disappointing and probably for the best.)

I have also started redesigning my own logo. I have experimented with typography, bull iconography, and dragon iconography. The bull is overplayed. The dragon, so far, looks like I run a video game company instead of a design studio. I am closer to the finish line only because I have ruled out some available options.

For each of these projects, I am in the messy middle. I do not see an end. I do not know when I will have something more concrete I can share with you again. I do not enjoy this part of the process.

But all I can do is embrace it.

Until next week,

Nathan

Happy Friday! Big week. Get your favourite beverage. It’s 5 o’clock somewhere (unless it’s, like, 9am wherever you are. In that case, hold off tiger).

What’s inspiring you?

A lot of links to share this week. I went on a bit of a branding binge, so to speak, and ended up with a lot of great stuff. Instead of breaking it down as a numbered list, I thought I’d make this a little easier to read and group it by headings.

Zoo branding

I revisited the branding for Chester Zoo by How&How, San Diego Zoo’s identity by Pentagram, Oregon Zoo’s branding by Studio DAD, and the identity for Houston Zoo by Design By Principle. There’s a lot of great work in this category.

And if you’re willing to dip into history: Pentagram borrowed liberally from the 1975 National Zoo brand identity by Lancy Wyman.

Museum branding

Check out the great work on the Natural History Museum by Pentagram. Wow! I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Leo & Burnett’s rebranding of the Royal Ontario Museum, shamelessly (and brilliantly) pilfered a little by the work Pentagram did for the Library of Congress. (Lots of Pentagram work in here. They’re the best.)

I’m fascinated by how museums all end up sharing similar vibes. It’s all grotesque sans-serifs and grayscale aesthetics. As a society, we’ve decided that Helvetica is the best way to dress up a sixteenth century piece of art.

But not every museum has to be that way. For a less all-caps-grotesque direction, check out Nature Museum by Span.

Aquarium branding

First of all, you’re basically branding water. Tough gig. Not as tough as branding something like Aquafina, but still: not easy. The brand work that Doe Anderson did for Georgia Aquarium looks great. This is the last time I’ll bring up Pentagram (ok, second last), but their work on the Monterey Bay Aquarium makes me feel like I need to find a new career; it’s incredible stuff. (I am a huge fan of the subtle way they bring it all together in the aquarium’s Shoreline magazine.)

Church branding

Check out the Hackney Church brand identity by Omse. An extremely smart way to brand a very interesting church.

Booze branding

I discovered Chad Michael this week and am blown away by the vibes he bring to alcohol designs. Check out his work on Oxson Bourbon Whiskey, Slane Irish Whiskey, Hywilde Liquers, and Gold Bar Whiskey.

Our local booze scene has a sort of Pacific Northwest vibe to it, possibly because Hamilton is a steel town. I was admiring Collective Arts this week and looking for other beers with a similar vibe. I liked the designs for Inbound Brewing by Michael Byzewski, the work Dessein did for Beerland Brewing, the 2012 Creemore designs by Jump, and the Apprch and Austin Eastciders designs by Aaron Draplin. Also, Codo Design writes a very helpful annual review of the beer design trends scene.

Departed Spirits by Marx Design knocked my socks off. A completely different take on this sort of branding and product design. (My favourite was the vodka label they designed, which simply reads: “Very good vodka. So good that it doesn’t taste like vodka.”)

Simple and straightforward branding

The Departed Spirits brand is a great transition into another sort of branding that I don’t have a great name for. If Ron Swanson’s commercial for Very Good Building & Development Co were a real thing, it would qualify. It’s simple, straightforward branding that tells you exactly what you’re getting.

I thought of Ron Swanson immediately when I saw Pentagram’s work on Payz, which confidently uses Graphik as its typeface and boldly and simply proclaims, in all lower-case and with all the confidence in the world: “We are a bank.” And not a wonder Payz is so confident, when their claim is actually quite easily proven. (I have often been tempted to reframe Wildfire Studios as simply “a very good design studio,” but I don’t want to argue with anybody.)

I was reminded of Canada’s rich history with this exact kind of branding. If you live outside of Canada, you might make jokes like this, but in Canada, we have No Name (last rebranded by Gopika). A black and yellow bumblebee aesthetic that proudly states: “This is a frozen pizza. This is chocolate ice cream. This is tomato sauce.” And you need no further explanation.

If you’re not from Canada and you’ve taken a look at that, you are either planning to move here or you’re completely stupefied, because those are the only two possible reactions. But Canada has a rich history of simple, colourful design. I think it’s because so much of our lives is spent in winter, and we never see the sun.

Lest you think that No Name is alone in its irreverance, we also have No Frills, last rebranded by Landini & Associates. Yes, that’s a supermarket draped almost entirely in black and yellow. (The same parent company owns No Frills and No Name, for what that’s worth, and all these colours date back to 1978.)

What are you working on?

This week, I’ve been designing a CMS, working on a product strategy for a nonprofit, and looking for design references for the MHBC stylescapes. Since both the CMS and the product strategy are private at the moment, I thought I would share the cool stuff I’d found for MHBC this week with you.

Originally, I’d written a few thousand words about how I went about looking for this material, why I chose the sources I did, and why I do all this work when I start thinking about stylescapes, as well as the right way and wrong way to do it. But once you’ve written a novella, it’s time to admit you’ve exceeded the boundaries of a weekly blog post update. When this project comes to a close, I have a series of videos planned breaking down the behind the scenes at every step. One of those videos will outline finding design references, what a stylescape should do, and why it’s not a moodboard (unless you’re doing it wrong) in detail, so if you need even more information, keep an eye out for that.

Until next week,

Nathan

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening at the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

1. “Shock! Shock! I learned yesterday that an open problem I’d been working on for several weeks had just been solved by Claude Opus 4.6.” Don Knuth, computer scientist and professor emeritus at Stanford, wrote about Claude solving his own research problem. I can’t say I fully understand the math, or even mostly understand, but I thought this was extremely relatable: “Filip told me that the explorations reported above, though ultimately successful, weren’t really smooth. He had to do some restarts when Claude stopped on random errors; then some of the previous search results were lost. After every two or three test programs were run, he had to remind Claude again and again that it was supposed to document its progress carefully.” I am blown away at these LLM tools as research companions, and also befuddled when they behave exactly as Filip described.
2. A couple weeks ago, I shared a cool way to make minimalistic city maps. The website I linked to never worked, but somebody turned the open source code into a reliable app. It works for any longitude and latitude in the world, and it’s great for printing out a map.
3. Love The Studioworks Library, a free resource of practical tools and articles for freelancers and creative studios from (who else) Jessica Hische. Do your bookkeeping without Quickbooks! Figure out what a project is going to cost! Understand your hourly rate! The amount of stress this would have saved me fifteen years ago cannot be overstated.
4. I started reading about z-index and assumed I knew how to use it well. But I didn’t expect CSS tokens in my z-index.

What are you working on?

I don’t have much visual work to share this week. It’s just been heads down, focus-on-the-work go time. The strategy I shared last week was unanimously approved by the committee I report to. I’m now working on stylescapes. For other clients, we’re in the midst of strategically defining their next projects, and working together to write good, defensible briefs.

Outside of that, it’s just been the normal business of running a studio. My NAS somehow filled up with space — recording video footage will do that to you — and I had to order hard drives to fill it. This is the worst time in the world to buy hard drives, by the way; the cost is double what it was when I first bought the NAS. And, read this in your best TV announcer voice: 🦄 quantities are limited 💀, so you can only buy one hard drive at a time. So they’ve got you coming and going. It’s so dumb, but it’s been a process just to replace a few hard drives. (Remember when computers were fun? I’m old enough to remember when computers were fun. Oh, they’re still fun? I’m just old and curmudgeonly? Well, never mind. And way to be a jerk.)

I wrote two weeks ago about my own rebrand, but have already started redesigning everything I shared then. After sleeping on it for a couple nights, it was obvious that the design direction I walked down was a polished version of nothing in particular. Polish is good, but it felt to me like the cobbler’s children with no shoes. So back to the drawing board. More to come there in the future. I have set an internal deadline of May 4 to design the new website, which seems simultaneously a million years away and also tomorrow.

In the meantime, spring is finally arriving, and I can’t wait to bask in the glory of the sun’s rays on my patio.

Until next time,

Nathan

P.S. I’m over the burger CEOs.

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening in the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

1. I loved this piece about Van Gogh and yellow. Over the course of my career, yellow has gone from my least favourite colour to my favourite. It’s an extremely interesting colour to work with, and it’s fascinating to see one of the masters use it so extensively.
2. A couple miscellaneous things. First, I finally watched The Brutalist this week and fell in love with its photography. A gorgeous film. Trailer here. And while everybody else was in love with the MacBook Neo commercial this week (which is super well done, for what it’s worth), I fell in love with the commercial for the new MacBook Pros, which is this grainy, jazzy 100 seconds of joy, with music from Antonio Sánchez, the jazz composer behind the score for Birdman. I’ve watched this commercial 20 times. The syncopated editing is unreal. I just like the vibe. A lot.
3. I love the unusual clocks in [Christopher Butler’s collection](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3SIKAmPXY4. There is more than one way to track time.

What are you working on?

This week, I am starting work on some major strategic projects for clients. I have completed a first pass at the strategy for Mount Hamilton Baptist Church, the church project I’m working on. I’m presenting the strategy in detail this weekend so I can move on to phase two: stylescapes.

The hardest part of the strategy is always figuring out where the client sits in the competitive landscape. Where will they naturally end up going without careful thought and analysis? How do they plan on getting or maintaining a competitive edge? A good strategy impacts every part of your long-term planning and your future business.

This strategy ended up being about 100 pages long, and covers a lot of ground: everything from the competitive landscape, strategic direction, and brand tone of voice all the way to photography guidelines and archival instructions, a process for writing and updating copy on the future website, and notes on how the brand will impact the visual elements of the website.

It took about 8–10 hours of consultative meetings to get to the point where I could write the strategy. It would have been longer were I not an existing member of the church, and if I wasn’t already familiar with other churches in the area. I would have easily tripled the research time investigating other churches and interviewing church members to ask questions and probe for more information.

The meat and bones of the strategy, outside of the competitive analysis, are the personas. There are four main personas that we decided attend the church, and we got very specific about who they are and their habits. I’ll use these personas to craft stylescapes. The team will review the stylescapes, pick what they like and don’t like about them, and then review one final stylescape that merges all their favourite ideas so we can land on a visual direction for the brand identity and website.

More to come on this in a future video (months out at this point, but happening along with the rebrand of this studio). Keep your eyes on this space.

Talk to you next week,

Nathan

]]> https://staging.2026.wildfirestudios.ca/blog/studio-missive-29-behind-the-scenes-of-my-own-rebrand 2026-02-27T08:30:00-05:00 2026-02-26T12:23:36-05:00 Nathan Snelgrove

Sharing the initial designs of the rebranded website for this studio.

Hi friend,

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s inspiring me this week and a behind the scenes look at my own rebranding.

What’s inspiring you?

1. What’s the difference between a chip, a button, and a status label? This critique of chips and status labels is extremely my jam. I confess I have used all these in my design systems, and I’m not sure the design work is better for it.
2. Use modern CSS to automatically build a typographic scale. This hurts my brain, but in a good way. Marvellous work.
3. From the creators of Dark Sky: Acme Weather. Dark Sky was the only weather service I’ve ever used that accurately predicted and told the weather in my area, so I’m eager to hear how accurate this is. I love the aesthetics. They’re doing their own thing, and it’s fabulous.

What are you working on this week?

Get comfy with your favourite beverage, because this is going to take a while. This week, I was pulling at the threads of my own branding, and I feel it has finally come undone.

In the past couple months, I’ve written about my strategy, goals, and tactics for updating the studio website this year, along with adding more case studies and videos to the site. I’d like to dive deeper this week and share a larger update.

The first phase of this was repositioning myself. Naively, I assumed I could simply rewrite the home page and about page, add a couple service and sector sites, and leave the rest unchanged. In the past week, I finished the home page rewrite and repositioning, and started laying out the design. That’s when it hit me.

This whole studio needs a rebrand.

I have friends who will read this, and I can already see their eyes widening. In the next week, somebody will tell me to quit while I’m ahead. Rebrands are time-consuming and expensive. But I don’t believe you can change your brand’s posture without updating your brand’s aesthetics.

The last time I updated my branding and my website was January 3^rd, 2020. (I know this because I tweeted about it on that date.) This was serendipitous timing: my new branding emphasized my skills as an executor just in time for COVID to create a gold rush for people with my skillset. I positioned myself as “a designer and developer who listens, responds to emails, does the work, and doesn’t suck.”

My business doubled in 2020. To be clear: I was very lucky.

Things have changed. In 2026, LLMs are increasingly becoming the executors. They’re fast and they’re cheap. They’re stealing business from template builders, and it’s become more apparent they’re stealing business from people like me. The more clearly you have positioned yourself as somebody who “gets it done,” the more likely COVID is eating your lunch.

I’m proud that my current branding and positioning has worked for over half a decade. In internet years, that’s at least two lifetimes. But it’s time for a change. I need to position myself as a strategic thinker. I want to get hired to think deeply and clearly about my clients’ futures, and design and develop the tools that get them where they want to go.

None of that is clear in my current branding or positioning.

This week, I designed a new home page and a new work index. Some elements of my existing branding will remain, and some will go. This is an evolution, not a replacement. It’s also still a work in progress: I have to design the About page and update my case studies as well, so there’s a lot of work to go, and things are bound to change. The copy isn’t finalized; some of what’s in these layouts is still boilerplate. But this seems as good a time as any to share a preview with you.

The new home page is a lot cleaner than what I have now. It’s more focused. There’s more copy, but it’s easier to read, and the positioning is very clear. (The hero image is going to be a video in real life, so use your imagination.)

It took me twenty iterations to get here.

The new case studies index was challenging. A good archive page is scannable, which helps display the breadth of work. But I also want to illustrate the depth of my thinking. There are two case study presentations on this page. One of them includes a more detailed description and a testimonial. The other reads almost like list, with a smaller thumbnail acting as a bullet.

It took me 26 iterations on this screen to find my happy place. If you squint, you’ll see I tried lots of obvious ideas, some interesting ideas, and many ideas that are evidently wrong. But they were all worth exploring.

I wanted to share the iteration count because, while my strategy and goals were clear before I began designing anything, it still took many iterations before I landed somewhere that visually felt right. LLMs, at least in their current state, can’t provide this level of thought (and I don’t think they’d arrive at this design). It all comes down to the grey matter in our skulls.

Next up? The About pages and some case study redesigns, and possibly some rewriting. There’s a lot to go, but the progress is good.

Until next time,

Nathan

]]> https://staging.2026.wildfirestudios.ca/blog/studio-missive-28-phase-2-of-bruce-mayhews-website 2026-02-20T08:00:00-05:00 2026-02-20T00:25:33-05:00 Nathan Snelgrove

The second and final phase of Bruce Mayhew’s project is now complete, and other news from the studio.

Hi friends,

Happy Friday! I didn’t get a chance to send the missive last week; some emergencies at the house occupied too much time and space and ate into work. (Related: water is the enemy of the home.) So this week, there’s a lot to share. Let’s dive in. (No pun intended.)

What’s inspiring you?

1. CSS is making selects way better. Nice Select gives a great overview of the possibilities. I can’t wait until this is commonly abailable enough to use without fallbacks. (Looking at you, Safari.)
2. The new branding for Kanal by Base Design is so cool, particularly in the way it uses one extremely variable typeface, and the single font seemingly morphs into multiple forms. BP&O has a couple great examples of how it works, and I think their videos outshine Base Design’s own presentation.
3. In 2024, designer Cabel Sasser gave an incredibly inspiring talk about “the Sistine chapel of McDonald’s wall art,” and the man who painted it. Last week, Cabel shared the behind the scenes story of how the talk happened. Go watch the talk and read this post. There’s something special, and humbling, in celebrating one person’s very small contribution to our shared culture. I think it reminds us all that we only need to really touch one person. That’s the job of being a human: if we help, inspire, or change one person, we have moved a thousand.
4. In the last missive, I shared Terry Godier’s post asking why every RSS reader looks like an email inbox. Terry released his own RSS app that atttempts to solve the design problem in a new way. It’s called Current. Instead of treating your curated feed reader into an inbox, Current turns it into a river. Really neat design thinking and an atypical solution to a problem.
5. A friend sent me the portfolio for Collins, which is a massive agency that I somehow wasn’t familiar with. (The rock I live under is pretty big, and yes, it’s nice in here, thanks for asking.) What I love about the Collins site is the way they break down their services into programs. I wish I came up with it. It’s so smart.

What are you working on this week?

Phase two of Bruce Mayhew’s website is now up (see the information for the initial launch). This includes a new page for his book, including a couple photographs I took, a revised contact page, and a new design for his mission, vision, and values page.

It’s early days, but I’m pleased with how Bruce’s launch has gone. We launched at the end of January, and YOY, visitors are already up over 90%. If that number seems outrageous, this is a 40% improvement over January. Already, the site is seeing a 20% increase in engagement. It’s still too early to say how well it’s going definitively, but I’m pleased with early progress.

This week, I’ve also been working on the new landing pages for this site. I’ve been writing and rewriting them, and thinking carefully about the future of agencies in an AI-driven world (for better and for worse). I finished what I hope is the final draft of the home page today, and want to work on a few sector pages and polish them up in the next couple weeks so I can begin designing and building them.

My working theory at the moment is that AI, whether you like it or not, is likely going to subsume work where merit comes primarily from execution. In other words, if your reputation is that you do it when other people fail to — which is largely what I built my reputation on — then AI will eat you. This is largely because AI doesn’t need to sleep and can work faster than you, so if your value comes from execution, the robots can out-execute your work.

The only real option, from my perspective, is to shift upstream. If you want to succeed in a world where execution isn’t enough, you must offer something more.

I think I have the receipts to prove my strategic value, but I don’t lean myself into that positioning at all right now. That’s my goal for the coming months. Truth be told, AI is all so new and is developing so fast, I don’t know if this is the right long-term play. It’s the horse I’m betting on for now.

I hope I can share all that work with you soon.

Until next week,

Nathan

]]> https://staging.2026.wildfirestudios.ca/blog/studio-missive-27-rethinking-e-commerce-for-ehc 2026-02-06T09:00:00-05:00 2026-02-06T09:14:34-05:00 Nathan Snelgrove

This week at the studio, I implemented a new-to-me e‑commerce platform on a nonprofit’s website.

Hi friends,

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening at the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you:

1. Terry Godier asked why every RSS reader looks like an email inbox, and actually found an answer. He also asks why we can’t try something new and offers a few alternatives. I love being reminded that doing “what everybody else does” is optional, particularly in software patterns. (And I would wager part of the reason people don’t use RSS is because they don’t like email.)
2. These minimalistic city maps are gorgeous, and you can make your own for any city in the world. (The website for doing so doesn’t even load for me, but you can also just run some Python. Cool!)
3. Jon Hicks did a deep dive on the user experience of every major music app. What a treasure trove of insights. This piece is getting bookmarked for future projects. (As an aside: about five years ago, I told my wife that if Apple ever asked me to work in Cupertino and “fix the Music apps,” I’d seriously considering closing the studio to do it. iTunes used to be state-of-the-art, classy software. It’s part of the reason I fell in love with the Macintosh. Now, every time I use the Music app on my Mac, I turn into this.)

What are you working on?

In Studio Missive 13, I lamented about the current e‑commerce options available for nonprofits, and particularly despaired over how far Snipcart had fallen. In Studio Missive 14, I wrote about discovering Fundraise Up. Today, I’m excited to announce the first NPO I’ve transitioned to Fundraise Up is Every Home for Christ.

EHC’s previous system relied on Snipcart, which was becoming less and less viable, so there was a sense of urgency about this. Thankfully, Fundraise Up is one of the easiest e‑commerce systems I’ve ever worked with. Truthfully, there was very little to do: you copy and paste an embed code, and Fundraise Up handles everything else.

The biggest challenges were structural, not technical. For example, EHC offers free resources that supporters can order online. Previously, this was handled through Snipcart. Fundraise Up doesn’t support physical product orders, so this workflow had to be rebuilt from scratch.

To solve this, I designed a new ordering system using simple webforms built with Formie. The forms look almost identical to the previous Snipcart experience, so there is minimal learning curve and friction for existing supporters. Each order triggers a custom internal workflow, making it easy for EHC’s staff to process and fulfill requests.

For supporters, each resource order leads to a custom thank-you page that includes a donation prompt. Automated email sequences encourage people to move from a free resource order toward making a voluntary donation. Behind the scenes, each of these donations connects to a dedicated fundraising campaign and financial designation. This ensures every contribution is tracked and allocated correctly.

The result is a system with dozens of active campaigns in Fundraise Up, and more than a dozen resource-specific forms on the website. The strategic and tactical work required to design, configure, and coordinate all these moving parts was the most time-intensive part of this project. It involved multiple stakeholders, long-term planning, fallback strategies, and a tight execution window. Once the structures were in place, implementation was straightforward.

It’s too early to say if Fundraise Up is going to be a success. Snipcart boosted online giving for EHC by over 150% compared to their prior system. I was reticent to let it go. Just in case this all goes sideways, I’ve kept all the Snipcart code in a separate git branch, so now there are four “main” branches we use:

• main: This is the main branch on the production site for Snipcart.
• staging: This is the test branch for Snipcart code.
• main-fundraise-up: This is the currently-live production site, with Fundraise Up powering donations.
• staging-fundraise-up: This is the currently-live test site, with Fundraise Up powering donations.

All future work will be merged into both staging and staging-fundraise-up for testing. If we ever need to roll back to Snipcart, in case Fundraise Up is a dud, all I’ll have to do is swap out the git branches in production. In less than two minutes, we’d have a production-ready e‑commerce system with a different provider.

In short, this was an easy project to execute, but a difficult one to strategically and tactically plan. Without the data on how Fundraise Up performs, this makes a terrible case study, but the work is valuable and important.

For now, I consider phase one of this transition a success. But until I get the hard numbers back on Fundraise Up over the next several months, I will continue to search for the perfect e‑commerce solution for NPOs.

Until next week,

Nathan

]]> https://staging.2026.wildfirestudios.ca/blog/studio-missive-26-the-new-website-for-bruce-mayhew 2026-01-30T08:00:00-05:00 2026-01-30T09:04:24-05:00 Nathan Snelgrove

Launching the new website for Bruce Mayhew’s business and book.

Hi friend,

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s happening this week in the studio.

What’s inspiring you?

1. I’ve been waiting for this for years. Typography master Kris Sowersby and his team at Klim Type Foundry designed their own interpretation of Helvetica: “Die Grotesk.” Kris also wrote a great essay about how he approached the work, and why he did it now. Surprisingly philosophical and relatable, and a great little treatise on the angst of youth and the fear of selling out.

   Seriously, imagine an essay about designing a typeface that largely reads like this: “Perhaps this is what annoys many of my contemporaries about Helvetica — that it’s nakedly commercial, really good, and bloody successful? Nobody making fonts these days will openly admit, ‘I made this font for purely commercial reasons.’ It’s just not cricket… The craft world in general struggles with the idea of selling and selling out — surely the quality of the work should be enough? Surely, but no. That’s not how it works.”

   I cannot wait for an excuse to buy this typeface and use it. (I would use it on my own branding, but at this point, Graphik feels like a part of my DNA.)

2. While we’re talking about typography, Grilli Type has released Canon, a serif typeface that lives up to its legacy-imbibed name. Their website for the typeface demos by the font by reproducing selections from “the canon” of great text, including Frankenstein. Pound for pound, I think Grilli Type and Klim are two of the best type houses in the world right now.
3. This is the last typeface thing this week, I swear, but in other typography news, Swiss Typefaces’ new Only Extended is really nice.
4. New music: I love jazz in the studio, and Julian Lage is one of the greatest jazz musicians alive. (His main guitar is a Telecaster, and if you don’t realize how weird/cool that is for a jazz player, let me assure you it’s very weird/cool.) He’s teamed up with a new quartet for his follow-up to the fantastic Speak to Me. Their first album together, Scenes from Above, really cooks. Listen to it on Apple Music, Spotify, or, you know, wherever.

What are you working on this week?

This week, I am excited to unveil version one of the new website for Bruce Mayhew.

Bruce is corporate trainer, keynote speaker, executive coach, and now an author. He approached me in 2025 with some exciting news of his own: a publisher had picked up his first book. Should he have a new website too?

That question opened up a large can of worms: what sort of websites do authors have? How could Bruce integrate the book into the broader messaging of his website? Should his brand get updated? Where does his brand exist in the broader marketplace? Should his brand identity and the book have some sense of synergy?

We dialled in on a few things:

1. The most important thing here was Bruce’s work. The book was a supporting actor.
2. His brand identity needed a refresh as well as the website. While Bruce has competitors, none of them do what he does. He works with existing teams in corporate structures to help them work better together, and to train new leaders from within. We felt his existing brand could make that clearer.
3. We wanted his brand identity and his book to have some sort of synergy, and I personally wanted that synergy to be expansive to additional books, should he choose to write more in the future. While I wasn’t designing the cover, I wanted to contribute some elements from the brand identity and design system that could communicate something in a shared language.

In my second missive, I shared the three stylescapes (next-level moodboards) that we started with to agree on a direction. I wanted to share them again just as a brief reminder of where this project started.

In that post, I didn’t reveal Bruce’s favourite. But it’s time: Bruce loved “Imperfect Humanity,” and we both thought elements of “Evolving Leaders” were really working. Both of us felt that Bruce helped people evolve individually, but also move in a rhythm together.

Something about that reminded me of forests and the way that trees grow individually, but work cooperatively. We settled on this idea of a topographic motif that resembled the annual growth rings of a tree, but also resembled the ebbs and flows of rivers. Some lines are thicker and lead. Some lines are smaller and follow. But they all ebb and flow together, growing, changing, and working together as part of a bigger whole.

Once we landed on that direction, the entire design came together very quickly, and I think where we landed is a great blend of both directions. There are so many little details that I love: the background colour of the table of contents changes as you scroll through different sections, there are different “elevation levels” in the colour scheme that naturally reflect the environment around them, and the topographic maps seamlessly adjust as you change the size of the window (a real challenge to implement well).

The book cover ended up taking inspiration from our design as well, integrating the topographic line art into its cover with a complementary green that pops.

This is only the first phase of this project. There are a few minor enhancements that didn’t make the deadline, and a couple more pages to launch in time for the book’s official launch in mid-February, so keep an eye out for that. Until then, both Bruce and I would be honoured if you checked out the new website.

Until next week,

Nathan

P.S. There’s going to be another launch next week! It’s a busy time at the studio.

]]> https://staging.2026.wildfirestudios.ca/blog/studio-missive-25-status-update 2026-01-23T09:00:00-05:00 2026-01-22T11:03:41-05:00 Nathan Snelgrove

An update on what I’m working on in the studio and what’s launching when.

Hi friend,

Happy Friday! Here’s what’s cooking in the studio this week.

What’s inspiring you?

1. Christian Ivan made an animated visualization of the history of Paris from 300 BCE to the present. It’s only three minutes, but it’s fascinating to see the city grow and shift over time.
2. I don’t use a lot of animations in my work at the moment (I find them kind of distracting and/or annoying in use), but GSAP’s Sites of the Year 2025 is an impressive list of gorgeously animated websites.

What are you working on this week?

A lot of things. Last week I said I was working on deadlines, and I thought I’d be more specific this week.

Tomorrow evening, the new website for Bruce Mayhew will go live (see previous mentions). This was a long-running project, and I’m excited for it to be wrapped up. There will be some post-launch work to do; I’m helping Bruce fully launch his new book in February, and it needs a product page. But this is the biggest deadline, and it’s very close.

Today, the deck and notes for the strategy for the church rebranding I’m working on are going out. This is just in time for the church’s board to review everything. The deck includes persona breakdowns and the whole nine yards. This project is already taking longer than I expected, but it’s overall going well.

On February 4^th, my client EHC (previously discussed just before the holidays) is going live with a new e‑commerce system powered by Fundraise Up. I haven’t used Fundraise Up before, but the development process has been easy as pie. I hope it converts well. So far, conversions and revenue have only gone up with each new thing we have tried on EHC. The latest version of their donation site increased YOY revenue by over 150%. I hope that trend continues.

As far as my own work, I am behind. I still have a ridiculous revenue goal for the year. To hit that goal, I want to do the following:

1. Rewrite the copy, launch new landing pages, and redesign elements of the website to reposition the studio. I am roughly 3% complete on this, which is still something, but progress is slow. This is a top priority for me once I am done with Bruce’s launch.
2. Write new case studies. I have made no further progress on this.
3. Document the work I’m doing in video format. I have made no further progress on this because I haven’t done the work I need to document. That’s all forthcoming. I previously said this would be a seven-part series, and I’d be happy if some of it launched this quarter. I do not think any of them will go up this quarter.

Last week, I wrote about moving at 1x speed. I am, sadly, only one person. I have two arms, ten fingers, and one brain. I can only do so much. I’m eager to get moving more on everything. First up, though, is launching Bruce’s site. I look forward to sharing a link in the next missive.

Until then,

Nathan

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