Six months since we wrote you an email huh. Flies by. As a reminder: FF Studio is a design & technology studio run by Anna Goss and Eliot Fineberg. Hi!

We've just posted a case study of some work we did at the start of this year. It's about grantmaking, and power, and exploring uses of technology to enable better relationships and faster feedback loops. It's a bit of a beast of a case study, but people have been saying nice things about it, and you might enjoy it too. Here's a link. We were lucky enough to work with Debs Durojaiye and James Darling on this work; part of the joy of running FF is being able to bring together people we've admired the work of for years.

The studio has been running just over two years. In the first year, we'd do almost anything to be able to send an invoice. But now we're 8+ projects down, we've developed some clarity about what we're really good at: broadly speaking, it's making things that then inform a strategic direction. The ping back and forth between implementation and strategy, rather than one or the other. OODA loops come to life. Or maybe more like this handcranked Van de Graaff generator, spinning our lil wheel and knocking the foil baking cases off as we go.

What our clients get out of us doing this constant pinging is longer term roadmaps or strategies or plans that are informed by the reality ("guess what, we've prototyped a thing, and now we can tell you from experience that your in-house technology team needs Capability Y for us to be able to continue and for your organisation to feel the benefits") - rather than pure theory or imagination ("Capability building and development: three months"). As well as some kind of artefact that shows others in their organisation what can be possible - creating an expanded Overton window of belief.

Hi, 42 subscribers. Apparently we last sent an email in December 2023. We also hear that in this economy, to be alive is to be successful. We're still alive.

Vibes are weird. I've spoken to a few people recently where the conversations started with a puff-your-cheeks-out-this-economy-eh exhale. Recency bias means we compare ourselves to firms or agencies that came up during the Cameroonian GDS/UCD boom, but that economy is dead. Absolute bantz. The market is tough: race to the bottom on price, but we've got high standards and we're not trying to put bums-on-seats in every government department we've ever walked past.

So, if a general just repeats their previous battle, we are trying to avoid doing that. I am hopeful that being honest, human and vulnerable in public is a sea change in how companies might talk about themselves. Check it out and tell us what you think.

Like ever, I buried the lede - we made a new website. All the emails and Google Docs you would've normally received in the last 9 months are on our blog.