Bespoke Design

Looking at our most recent site launches (Kent School and Boston College Graduate School of Social Work) brought to mind a recent conversation I had with creative director Doug. He was telling me that one of the differentiators he’s found in working for mStoner is the way that we approach creative. In some firms, he was telling me, it doesn’t matter which designer is working on a project—it will always end up looking like a Insert-Name-of-Chief-Creative-Officer Here design because those designers create for that person’s sensibilities. Eventually, everything converges. I don’t know that this is a bad thing (love or hate it, you know a Gehry building when you see one), but it’s not the mStoner way. Doug told me, in fact, that you can’t really look at an mStoner-developed site and immediately say that we created it. 

This dovetails with a comment that a new client made to me. He said that one of the reasons he hired us is that he looked at our portfolio and thought that every single design we showed him looked absolutely tailored to the institution it represented. “The Kellogg site looked like the Kellogg School, and the George School site felt like a Quaker boarding and day school should,” he said. That comment (and the contract) made my week.

At our best, we’re designing highly usable, visitor-centric sites that scale well on the back end, and on the front end really capture the place and people that the sites are meant to represent. And if that’s the way you ultimately can tell something that comes out of our shop, it’s a non-label I’ll happily wear.