Zerofee. Good Thinking:

Clis­sold Park, Lon­don N16, as inter­preted by the appalling iPhone camera

Dur­ing a beau­ti­ful week­end like this one, it’s tempt­ing to fan­ta­sise about aban­don­ing fixed offices and work­ing more flex­i­bly. When we’re not in the stu­dio in Lon­don W1, we’re at home in N16 – Stoke New­ing­ton – within a short walk of the won­der­ful, leafy Clis­sold Park (fea­tur­ing the square footage ref­er­enced in the title of this post). A brief walk around the park today helped us to resolve some think­ing about a cur­rent iden­tity project, slightly alter the colour of our pal­lid, designer faces and reveal to us that ter­rap­ins can and will yawn. In the past, we’ve even found our­selves agree­ing to a donated design project after an unplanned con­ver­sa­tion with a really inter­est­ing guy in the local library – more on that some­time soon.

Apart from tan­ning, get­ting closer to nature and stim­u­lat­ing ideas, one of us caught up on some read­ing, while another checked email and cor­re­sponded with one of our hard work­ing – it was a Sun­day – devel­oper friends on a dig­i­tal project. Could we quit a fixed office arrange­ment, work from ‘home’ and run Zero­fee from any loca­tion that suited us? Maybe. The tech­nol­ogy more-or-less facil­i­tates it (we could even run proofs remotely, although we’d have to make our way to the out­put device to check them over). The trou­ble is, the stu­dio serves as a reas­sur­ing sig­nal to clients – present and future – that we mean busi­ness and are well-established and, while reduc­ing over­heads would be nice, we’d be con­cerned about under­min­ing our per­ceived via­bil­ity as a design ser­vice provider.

And, we imag­ine, we’d miss the friends we’ve made in and around our offices, the exer­cise afforded by an 11 mile round cycling com­mute five days a week, and, even­tu­ally, become crip­plingly over­weight, each digit on our chubby, sweat­ing hands span­ning sev­eral keys in an appli­ca­tion shortcut-ruining phys­i­cal dis­abil­ity (voice-activation might be an option).

In all seri­ous­ness, though, we’d be keen to hear if and how other design­ers get by work­ing with­out a fixed office space. Does that affect your cur­rent and poten­tial client’s per­cep­tion of your busi­ness and capa­bil­i­ties. If so, how? If you’re read­ing this from ‘the client side’, would or do you find the notion of a design sup­plier with­out per­ma­nent offices a prob­lem? For far less than the cost of centrally-located (or even fur­ther afield) stu­dio space, it’s pos­si­ble to join a well-appointed, members-only club and use their facil­i­ties for meet­ings and some light work, not to men­tion inad­ver­tent net­work­ing. We’re not ready to change the con­tact details on our web­site just yet, but we could be tempted.