Jon Lax, from net Awards Agency of the Year nominee Teehan+Lax, explains how honesty and good work are their driving philosophies.
Teehan+Lax is one of five shortlisted nominees for the Agency of the Year award in the 2014 net Awards. We spoke to Jon Lax about the principles that underpin their working, and how the company is looking to make a change of direction this year.
Tell us about some work you're proud of.
It's always the thing we're currently working on which of course we can't talk about yet, but some of our greatest hits have been:
This past year has been pretty challenging. After 12 years we spent a lot of time trying to figure out what's next for this company. It hasn't been easy. I wrote a lot about this struggle in this post. We are going through a lot of changes and questioning what kind of company we will be over the next 10 years. Part of the fun is figuring that out but change is always unnerving.
Medium, one of Teehan+Lax's greatest hits
Do you have any special philosophies that drive your working practices and company culture?
It's always about the work. People make this business out to be more complicated than it is… do good work, get good work. Good work solves 80 per cent of your problems. It's that last 20 per cent that will drive you crazy. If you let the 20 per cent become 100 per cent of your focus then things go to hell.
What sets you apart from the rest?
I think our honesty. We talk about what went right and what went wrong on projects very openly. We try to be very transparent about who we are and what kind of work we want to put out into the world. That honesty translates into our work which is very straightforward. We just want to make things people will use.
We've remained very focussed on digital product design and trying to be great at that. We are definitely not a "full service" agency.
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Tanya is a writer covering art, design, and visual effects. She has 16 years of experience as a magazine journalist and has written for numerous publications including 3D World, 3D Artist, ImagineFX, Computer Arts, net magazine, and Creative Bloq. For Creative Bloq, she mostly writes about web design, including the hottest new tools, as well as 3D artwork and VFX.
