Chris Armstrong

Brand building is a team sport, but the teams are more complex, distributed and remote than ever. It’s hard to keep everyone on the same page when we’re all in a silo of one. Big brands like Instagram and IBM solve this with beautiful online hubs that communicate their brand story and keep the team aligned, but they also spend a small fortune doing it... so what about the rest of us? We’ve...

Brand building is a team sport, but the teams don't look like they used to. In a few short years we’ve gone from “in-house teams“ to “teams-in-houses“, and it’s hard to stay on the same page when everyone is in a silo of one. So instead of moving your brand forward you spend days—weeks—unearthing artefacts lost six levels deep in Dropbox, dealing with the fallout of vague briefs and...

It’s 2020, but instead of flying cars we have a global pandemic and Trevor from marketing asking if you could re-send him that logo you sent him last week. We don’t know anything about vaccines, so we figured we’d solve the logo thing instead. To be fair, when your brand assets are spread across the four corners of the web, it’s hard to keep track. Guidelines are in Keynote or Slides (except...

This is such a no-brainer, the lowdown email is one of the few emails I get that SAVES me time

Love Sidebar, pretty much the only newsletter I always open

This is really exciting. We’ve been with Intercom for 7 years and it’s gotten increasingly overpriced and bloated with stuff that feels like it’s aimed exclusively at Silicon Valley businesses who don’t look like us. We’re using Baremetrics for SaaS metrics and dunning already, would definitely consider switching to it for messaging if there’s enough of an overlap in core functionality.

Looks great, could see this being useful for a lot of folks who are having to take their businesses online for the first time

This could be very useful, I’m starting to drown in Slack communities

At Niice, we spend a lot of time talking to creatives around the world, learning how they deal with the challenges they face in the industry. The same topics come up time and time again; campaigns getting exponentially more complex, teams getting more remote and dispersed, and brands investing more on in-house teams. It seems like the entire creative industry is in flux right now. Luckily...

Four years ago this week, we launched the first version of Niice (known internally as Vanilla Niice). Since then we’ve learned a lot about how creative teams of all shapes and sizes collaborate, and the common problems we all face. The creative process is a conversation, and when creative projects fail it’s rarely due to a shortage of ideas or talent; it’s because communication breaks down....