Blogging at Hot Studio

Katrina Alcorn: So at the very basic level, blogging is just a technology that allows people to publish whatever they want on the Web very easily and because it's an easy publishing platform what you find is that when people blog, what they write about lends itself to be more familiar, more colloquial then you would be if you were writing for a newspaper or writing for some publication where you had to go through many steps to get something published. Renee Anderson: Blogs are really about a personal voice, a personal tone and everybody has their own style of writing. So this is a way to really break down that kind of 'we are a company and we have this brand' and 'we are an agency' and it's like but we are also about people. We are about the people who work here and each person has a unique story. Henrik Olsen: We launched out blog probably about a year ago and the thing that's really fun about ours is that everybody in that company contributes to it, so we are all authors and it's not just the principles of the company writing up there but it's anybody who has some sort of thought on a design aspect. Katrina Alcorn: It's been an interesting organic process seeing how people are slowly making a blog a part of what they do in their workday or outside of their workday and figuring out what's okay to write about when you are representing the company versus what you would write about on your personal blog. Renee Anderson: We are still working through exactly what we want it to be, how far do we want it to go. I think we have drawn the line at posting pictures of our puppies. But we don't necessarily want to keep it so constrained to 'we're a design firm, let's talk about design all the time.' I think that there are a lot of really interesting aspects of being a user-centered design firm that can translate out to daily activities, life activities. Henrik Olsen: I like it in that it doesn't have the pressure of writing for a magazine, per say, that has to be coming out every other month or something like that. I mean you can really come up with some ideas and try them out. People will then respond to your article with comments on it. So you get that almost instant feedback about what people think, what are you working on. So it's sort of a great testing ground and you can float ideas out there, stir them around, see how people respond. So that's the thing that I like about it, is the somewhat informality about it.