I’m getting fed up of making the rich, richer

That heading is a perfect summary of where I’m at right now. I’ve been in a bit of a turmoil-driven thinking period recently and I can’t shake the thought that what I set Set Studio up for isn’t being truly fulfilled. I think I need to change that.

I always wanted the studio to do net good and give back as much — if not more — than it takes. The thing is, running a studio that supports staff is hard, so naturally, you take on projects that you might not fully be behind. We’ve done great work — and continue to do so — but collectively, we’re all a bit burned out with Marketing™ oriented and KPI-chasing work.

We’re very lucky that we still get opportunities to work with fantastic clients that truly understand what they’re about too. For example, we’re working with Lefroy Brooks right now and man, they know their stuff. They’re a joy to work with and most importantly, they respect the user, so are fully behind all of our efforts to make a website that truly works for everyone.

Clients like that are rare though. They’re really rare. Working with clients like Lefroy Brooks and Jamie Clarke — people that care so much for the web — has 100% contributed to my thinking recently because I’m constantly thinking “why can’t more clients be like this?” and I think they can when you approach things a bit differently.

I want to position Set Studio and Piccalilli with the following principles:

1. We share as much as we possibly can of the work we do and how we do it, resulting in us providing free — at the point of entry — real-world education material.
2. We focus our work on campaigns, movements and other efforts that bring tangible, progressive change to society.

Working in the open

I’ve forever been obsessed with sharing knowledge. It’s why I’ve blogged so relentlessly over the years because I feel a constant debt to a community that shared so much when I started out.

The thing is, when I started out around 2008, so much content was highly technical, long and hard to read. What you need to understand about me is I’m not academic. I’m only educated up to A-level in the UK and I scraped through that by the skin of my teeth. Because of that, I found highly technical content hard to understand.

Way back when I started, I stumbled across blogs like CSS-Tricks and immediately resonated with the writing style. It’s why I write like I do now — pretty much how I talk — because I am obsessed with my content being approachable to everyone.

I want to up the ante though. When we evolved Piccalilli last year, we partially worked in the open, in the form of a series of posts, sharing how we did it. I want us to push further than that though and do full projects in the open, sharing as much as we possibly can during all parts of the process.

First, we’re going to do an internal project in the open. It’s very likely going to be the redesign of the CUBE CSS website. There’s a couple of reasons for that:

1. We need to get used to the idea of sharing our agency work
2. Its content that will resonate with our current audience
3. Doing an internal project allows us to smooth out the edges

We’ve already explored some creative ideas like the below. We’ve got a head start, but we’ll go all the way to the start to show you the whole process.

We’re also doing a lot of branding related work for upcoming courses on Piccalilli, along with bringing series like Reality Check back into focus with a much more soft-skills and collaborative edge to help people develop their relationship with designer and developer colleagues, while also, producing great work. There’s a lot of content like that in my course, but that’s only open to people that can afford it. I’d love for us to invest more time in sharing that work to give people that real world education they so desperately want and make it free at the point of entry.

The next iteration of open working is we link up with UK-based progressive movements and develop them a world class web presence, for free. There’s so much money sloshing around in UK politics, but it’s in the wrong hands because it’s with the right-wing parties such as Reform and the Conservatives. They get funding from big business and billionaires because right-wing policies make them richer.

Progressive movements, however — and unsurprisingly — do not get anything near that sort of money. In fact, they don’t get money at all really. A lot of movements are run during out of work hours on top of people’s day jobs. Meanwhile, the right get funding, column inches and broadcast TV slop like GB News.

Also because of this lack of funding, a lot of the work progressive movements need to do on the web is cobbled together with free templates and is often, clunky. That’s no shade on them by the way, the web is increasingly complex, so getting even a modest website out there is hard.

What we want to equip these people with, is the tools that we’ve equipped for-profit clients with so successfully over the years. The thought is that will super-drive progressive movements to push the change we so desperately need.

We’re not out of the woods in the UK. Sure, we finally got away from 14 years of Tory rule — thanks in a huge part to tactical, progressive movements like The Movement Forward — but unless the incumbent Labour government deliver promised change, we’ll be back with our country being ripped apart by Reform and co, just like Trump and co are ripping the USA apart as we speak.

If our studio is behind movements that prevent that from happening, I’ll be unbelievably happy. We’ll finally be doing what we set out to do in the first place.

How does it all get funded though?

We’ve tried talking companies into funding progressive work and it’s almost always “how can this benefit our profit/brand/image though”? Like I said earlier, the rich fund the right because that keeps them rich.

I’m thinking down a different path. A more distributed path, I guess. My thought is we set up an Open Collective (or alternative, transparent platform) and fund this work from the community. That could be individuals and it could be companies that believe in progressive political movements, like the ones we want to produce work for.

The return? Progressive movements get an outstanding web presence and the web community gets genuine real world education as we design and build these web presences in the open.

At the end of the day, all I want is to live comfortably and support my family. The Set team are exactly the same. We’re not looking to Get Loaded™ and buy extremely tasteless Lamborghinis. We’ve all being doing this thing forever — 50+ years combined — and we’re at the point in our careers where we want our work to do as much good as possible, across the board.

The obsession with AI (and other vapourware) in our industry just depresses me, especially when there’s so much need for tech to be a vehicle for progressive progress. Increasingly the tech industry is doing the opposite: fuelling the hard-right — who coincidentally are very much using AI . The tech industry are also fuelling the reckless policymaking — and yeh, that’s depressing.

Anyway, am I barking up the right tree here? Is this something you could get behind with support? I’d love your thoughts while I think about this stuff more and work it all out.