08/10/2026
Design is a team sport.
We talked a lot last week about context—and the value of working together toward a common goal.
Like any athletic pursuit, there is a motion and fluidity to design. You stand in the batter’s box or at the top of a mountain and visualize what comes next: the base hit, the turn, the line through the trees. There’s a brief moment when you can almost feel the outcome before you move.
Design can feel the same way. Putting pencil to paper and shaping those first few lines on a plan is physical, intuitive and visceral. But those lines don’t emerge from nowhere.
Behind them is a much broader context: the collective knowledge of a studio. Years of projects, conversations, mistakes, successes, materials, books, sketches and experiences—all forming a foundation to push off from. And, just as importantly, the person sitting ten feet away who sees something you don’t.
We’ve maintained a studio in downtown Portland for more than a decade—including through the height of COVID—because we believe being together matters. Ideas get pinned up. Someone rolls their chair over. A question becomes a sketch. A sketch starts a conversation. And the work gets better.
Technology has made it possible to work from almost anywhere. We embrace that flexibility. But we still believe there is something difficult to replicate about a room full of designers working alongside one another toward a common goal.
Great design may begin with an individual idea, but rarely does it stay that way.
