no|inc is an independent digital communications consultancy focused on solving business problems through user-centric design thinking and emerging information technologies.
The firm was founded in 2000 by partners Jim Hagen, Mark Maloney, Alex Markson, and Andrew Spangler with a shared vision — to break down barriers. Between design and technology. Between agency and client. Between online and offline. To truly embrace the ideas of creativity, collaboration, and craftsmanship. We believe that the best ideas bring together disparate disciplines into a cohesive whole. Ergo, the barriers thing.
It's kinda like how Watson and Crick were able to deduce the structure of DNA without stepping foot into a lab. How? They took a step back from their own ideas long enough to put the work of others into perspective. They connected the dots. Placed things into context. It's the kind of thinking that we wanted to explore.
That was a pretty radical vision at the time. You may remember the large agencies that were "leveraging cross-media synergies" and billing for services that they were inventing as they went along. They spoke in buzzwords, and everything was proprietary. Yet they forgot that all that they were doing was enabling communication. In their professional myopia, they lost sight (pardon the pun) of the real matter at hand.
Learning to type or to drive a car are wonderful skills to have. But writing a novel or getting to the beach is "the point" of such skills. As novelists (so to speak), we were completely suffocated by an agency full of typists and left the thriving firm at the height of the so called "dot com boom" and the bull (so to speak once again).
Our task is not to bring order out of chaos, but to get work done in the midst of chaos.
George Peabody
Things have clearly settled down since then. Both clients and agencies are beginning to understand that creating effective communication online is completely different than creating it offline. The dynamics are different. The reasons for being are different. Digital and network-enabled communications are not television. They're not print. They're not outdoor. You take a bit of all three, add some video game immersion and interactivity, throw in some conversation and maybe a couple of librarians and a "street team" and then maybe you get closer to what we're talking about here.
As technology continues to marginalize geography and distribution as drivers of business strategy, the very idea of what constitutes corporate communication, advertising, customer service — even what consititutes business itself — will continue to evolve as well.