"Restructuring" is a management term which sounds harmless. But if you ever experienced one, you probably know that it seldom is.
But it’s what we – Christophe, Michael and Johannes, the three partners in precious – felt was necessary. We won’t go into details now – we all need more time to reflect. But here are the facts:
A part of the team will focus on our long-term work for NumberFour AG (we referred to that project as "Puichon" in the past) and our Design Tools activities, while Michael will take care of the development and distribution of The Product Field. We stop working on other design service projects for the time being.
As a painful consequence we parted with some of our workmates. It was the toughest decision we ever had to make. These are not just talented people, but awesome human beings which we love being around with.
It’s a sad moment for us. But I’m sure that once the fog has lifted, we all will see a clear image of a bright future.
We started the week with only half the staff – and with every day someone else left for the holidays.
Maja was in for just a day, but the output she produced was good for at least two. Arved polished the product field website, which we will launch in January. Christophe and I worked on Puichon, and Svenja made sure that our clients can put an invoice under their christmas trees.
We launched the Precious Design School website this week. It’s an overview of workshops/courses we have already done with some of our clients, and now offering to a wider audience. If you want training for your team – designers, developers, product managers or anyone else who is involved in building a digital product – have a look at the website and contact us.
We are also planning to offer some of the courses not just for whole teams, but individuals. If you are interested, you can sign-up here to be notified.
Speaking of which: On Thursday, Florie, Aisha, Sean and Michael went to betahaus for two workshops with teams from a large aviation company. One was about research and the other about the Product Field. I haven’t talked to them since, but I know they had some great ideas to make it not just informative, but also fun and inspiring. One of those ideas was to turn the Product Field into 360° room installation.
Maja and Florie worked on the identity for a wine shop. It’s coming along very nicely.
Arved build a slick new website for The Product Field. Should be online soon.
David, Christophe and I focussed on Puichon. David still adding and refining sticker sheets to make the platform’s components usable in Sketch. Christophe is jumping between platform and app design. And I am updating older drafts to a new design and defining layout rules for all screen sizes.
Yannik is our new “Werkstudent”, supporting us with icon production for Puichon. Welcome!
Visitors in the studio this week:
Jason, who hung out with Michael for a couple of days to bounce ideas off each other. Everything from software product design to spirituality (and the intersection of those) was discussed. I’m a bit sad that I didn’t have more opportunity to chat with him, because I'm sure it would have been very inspiring.
Matthias (of 040x040 and It’s the glue), who brought GlueWein and talked with Michael and Florie about a potential collaboration for a client project.
Also:
More christmas festivities. After our own party last week, some of us went to our client's xmas party and obviously had fun.
We are right in the middle of the annually end-of-the-year craze. Some client projects need to be finished before the holidays, and we want to get out or done a few internal projects before we say goodbye to 2016.
The Product Field Reference Guide
One thing we already did finish in time was the production of our very first book. The Product Field Reference Guide, written by Wolfgang Wopperer-Beholz, Klaus-Peter Frahm and our Michael, illustrated and designed by Maja, is now available for sale!
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Despite of all the bustle, we found some time to have a christmas dinner together:
The Gang (minus David) at Mazza.
Besides our regular activities for project Puichon, which involved Christophe, David, Sean and myself, the rest of the team was working on a new website/offering we will launch soon, as well as the final parts for the Product Field Guide. The book is already at the bookbinder, and we expect it to arrive next week.
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Now that the weather starts to turn more grey each day, we thought the world could use more colors. So we are now presenting a new palette each week at Open Color Tools.
If you don’t want to miss the next palettes, follow @opencolortools on twitter.
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Our studio space became quite a mess over the last years, so on Friday we didn’t turn on our computers, but decluttered our desks, shelves and storage instead. Some strange and forgotten things turned up. It was fun. And cathartic.
Again, I only have a fuzzy idea about what the others did, because I was focused entirely on Puichon for the first half of the week. So was David, that I know.
On Thursday morning we opened our studio to kick-off the 040x040 event. 40 people from Sweden and Hamburg came by to hear some talks and exchange ideas.
Michael infected the Swedes with the Product Field virus, while Florie talked about doing design research on a budget.
In the days prior, Maja took care of all the printedmatter for that event and Aisha organised everything to make our guests feel welcome.
