Hey, friend! What a calm, predictable, and status quo Q1. Couldn't have asked for a more relaxing start to the year, amiright?
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SIKE!! Q1 was bonkers, and we all know it. But hey...we're all learning together again. The baselines have been rewritten, but the business objectives remain the same. SDH is here to help.
We won gold! It has been years since we entered any awards. To be honest, it just wasn’t our thing. This year, we had a couple of projects we couldn’t help but show off. We were pumped when the marketing website we did for BoxCar Apartments took home gold.
We worked with Creative Director Kayla Dugger from MyNiche to bring it to life. Go team go.
Things that make BoxCar friggin’ awesome:
✅ Custom front-end build
✅ Yardi API integration for floorplans and tour scheduling
✅ Tight CMS integration with the Webflow platform
✅ Local mapping integration
SDH Founder and Creative Director Ben Visser had a blast running a Lovable / AI training session with the Knowledge Perk Coffee Company team. Huge shout-out to Ryan Sanderson for investing a morning in collaboration, learning, and building with us.
Ben was just a guide, sharing what he's learned over the last year, combined with 20 years of industry experience. It was awesome seeing REAL things being built in REAL time with REAL impact.
Museums spend years curating what goes on display. Most spend far less time curating how they present themselves to the world.
How we help
A few of the amazing institutions and artists we've worked with
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In episode three, Lauren Marquess of Foundry Commercial joins us and talks marketing in CRE. Visit our site to watch the full episode.
We are excited to welcome Northwood Ravin to the Social Design House client family! Two projects in the hopper and already looking suh-weeeet. 🎉
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Ben spent 24 hours mentoring at Winthrop University's FinTech AI Hackathon, and the biggest takeaway wasn't about the tech. It was about the energy. Twenty-four-hour runway, hard problems, and teams that had never worked together shipping near-production output by morning.
The good news is you don't need a hackathon to get that energy. A few ways to bring it into how your team works every day:
The best ideas didn't come from the most structured processes; they come from small teams given the space to move fast, try things, and learn out loud. Give your people a simple problem, a short runway, and the tools to build together. Then get out of the way. Most importantly, make something real.
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Think README, but for design systems. Google released it as an open standard, free for anyone to use or build on top of. One common format for how designers and developers talk to each other and create context within LLM design tools.
Our take: Standardization is a positive. Design docs have been stuck in the ancient PDF format for years. A shared spec means better tooling, cleaner AI handoffs, and less time arguing about file names. We're already thinking about how it folds into our process. This is essentially a structured markdown file that sets the stage for how your brand assets should look, feel and sound. Seems that we are ahead of the curve.
Yep, you read that right. The wool sneaker brand is pivoting to AI compute infrastructure and rebranding to NewBird AI. Wall Street loved it. The stock shot up big time.
Our take: No real take other than confusion and validation that the AI revolution is making companies do crazy things. What's next!? Should we expect Chili's baby back data centers?
Anthropic dropped Claude Design, a new tool that turns conversations into designs, prototypes, and slide decks Anthropic. We've seen tools like this recently but this announcement feels bigger simply due to the company attached to it.
Our take: Great for iteration and ideas, but not ready for primetime. Keep an eye on it, though...bound to improve and find its place in the market. We are working through a couple of use cases on some small internal projects and will report back on our LinkedIn feed soon.
