Setting the Standards: How Two Designers Build Around their Passions and Problems

Hamish Smyth and Jesse Reed have started their third business within their business. Image by Clement Pascal and courtesy of Order.

Business is good at Order, the Brooklyn design office founded by Hamish Smyth and Jesse Reed. The tell? Smyth recently put out the following call on Twitter: “We’re hiring...any location, any level.” And they need the extra hands. At last count, they’ve started their third venture within their larger business. They launched the independent publishing imprint, Standards Manual, run their studio that focuses on brand identity work, and are now building Standards, a tool for designers to create digital brand guidelines. 

Smyth and Reed are representative of the next wave of entrepreneurial designers who have day jobs—plural—thanks to starting new companies around their passions and problems.

That’s how Standards came to be: Smyth and Reed kept repeating a series of processes over and over again while designing brand guidelines for clients. So they decided to build their own digital tool to automate the process and, long story short, they have had 17,000 people sign up for early access. (Being a passionate bunch, these test users had plenty of feedback.) Now, Smyth and Reed are rolling out the beta. Here, Smyth shares what led them to design their own tools, why they each focus on one part of the business full-time, and the hard-earned insights about running multiple projects at once.

Standards can turn a project that might take 1-2 days into one that takes 1-2 hours. Image courtesy of Order.

What are you solving for with Standards?

A process that is still stuck in the PDF for the majority of branding projects. We thought we could update that and automate the repetitive processes that are the same each time—show the typeface, colors, and the specs.

What we're doing differently than other brand guidelines is to give you the power of computing to create high-level brand components that you repeat often—at least half of the guidelines—while giving you the flexibility to design the rest of the components however you want. Essentially what Squarespace allowed for websites.

It’s really aimed at studios to begin with, people like us who might create a few guidelines per year. It’s also aimed at agencies who might create dozens of guidelines per year. As every major company now has an in-house design team, we’re also trying to figure out how to cater to them.

How much time can this tool save someone? 

We’re still building it out, but we think you can do a project that might take 1-2 days in 1-2 hours.

Why hasn't anybody built this before? It sounds like a no brainer.

As we’ve discovered, it seemed like a simple idea in the beginning. We realized early on that it's a lot more complicated than creating this simple tool.

One of the challenges is figuring out ease of use, versus freedom of use—that’s a spectrum right there. You could give people a few controls and templates and that satisfies a lot of people. But you leave people who want freedom grasping for more control.

There are some great tools out there. The reason we decided to build our own was that we couldn't find one that gave us the quality control that we wanted. We have second-mover advantage. Other people have already had a shot, and we're now taking ours.

In 2019, Hamish Smyth and Jesse Reed developed the design system for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

There is a history of innovators building their own tools. Bill Bowerman used a waffle iron to create the first Nike track spikes. Is there someone in history you’ve looked to for inspiration? 

I'm a big fan of computer history and when I was in college I remember watching Douglas Engelbart give, what has been retroactively named, “The Mother of All Demos.” I'm butchering his presentation, but he demoed a prototype of the mouse, which had never been seen before. And he demonstrated rudimentary—albeit super advanced for the time—vector illustration. It was cutting edge stuff and that led me down the tracks of design and computing. 

How have you and Jesse decided to work on Order, Standards Manual, and this project?

When we got all those early access sign ups we thought Standards could be something big. It needed real attention, so I've focused on it pretty much full-time. Jesse is pretty much full-time on Order. We share running Standards Manual. 

Initially, we thought each of us would work half the time on Standards and half the time on Order, but Standards is a technology company and Order a design agency, and I've discovered the type of work is so drastically different that it's really hard to split time on it. I think splitting our time 50/50 slowed us down. 

Can you elaborate on how it slowed you down? And what finally pushed you to move from the 50/50 split to each overseeing something entirely?

The kind of work that Standards is—which is essentially an early stage technology company—is really different to the type of work Jesse and I have gotten used to at Order, which is deadline-driven client services. What slowed us down was that we only able to give Standards half or less of our attention, because most of our time was consumed with client work. With Jesse now focused on Order, and me on Standards, we believe it is a more efficient and impactful use of both our time. 

The catalyst to change to change from the 50/50 time split came in August 2020, when we launched the standards.site website and took early access signups. Our goal was to get over 1,000. By the end of day one, we had 10,000 signups. When that happened, we knew Standards could be something, but that it was going to need more attention to do so. 

What a nice way to enter an office; this is the entrance to Order’s studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Image courtesy of Order.

For like-minded spirits who want to run multiple full-scale projects at once, can you share a few guidelines that have helped you expand?

We’ve always found the most success in projects that were closely aligned with our interests. When that is the case, you are essentially marketing to someone with similar interests to you. Then as your customers and audience grows, you can attempt to branch out and reach new people. It doesn’t always work (we’ve had projects that failed), but even then you’ll learn something. Another thing is to start projects that have a significant difference to what you are doing now. That allows you to switch over to another work style, which can help you from getting tired of doing the same thing all the time. 

What might you do differently as you evolved from your original studio to also becoming a book publisher and tech venture? 

Order has probably been the company where we’ve made the least amount of mistakes, because we came in with a fair idea of how the design industry worked. Publishing with Standards Manual on the other hand has been an adventure. Design and production wise we’re knowledgeable, but logistics have been a challenging area to put it mildly. 

But if we had to do it over, we wouldn’t change anything—the choices we made got us to where we are today and we’re grateful for what we’ve learnt along the way, both professionally and as people.

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