I had dinner with Paul and Craig at the New York Bar and Grill at the top of the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, a planned indulgence, after a rocky start to 2007. I lost all sense of time and place. My first steak in almost a year, and I’d wait another year for the next one if I can have it there again.

AQ is redesigning its website for the first time since it’s founding three years ago. The process has been long, stop-start and improvisational, completely unlike our client projects, which we keep tightly-structured. Our own business cards and brochures went much the same way, and the results are always fine, but the rhythm change is always stressful. Why does our standard process to a basic design problem not fit when we become the client?

I think there are two reasons: First, being the client is tough work. It’s easy to take for granted how much client’s have to do to keep a project moving: gathering and editing content, scheduling photo shoots, building consensus. When we become our own clients, we are effectively doubling the workload we are used to for a website, and often chipping away at this workload off hours.

Secondly, good design projects are conversations between client and designer, who check and balance each other, propelling the project forward in the process. Without another team on the other side to volley back, you have to continually step under the net, adjust your perspective, pick up the ball and hit it back over.

For some there is March Madness, for Paul, it’s the seasonal debut of mobile phones. In terms of pure technical specs, I can understand why he’s more excited this season than last, but I guess I lost my interest too long ago.

While there are always one or two beauties, with the iPhone on its way, it’s become even clearer to me that the Japanese carriers release way too many phones. Their approach seems to be to split up the market into as many demographic segments as they can, and give each their own phone with it’s own brand message, form, color and feature set. This seems like a slightly more evolved variation on the “spray and pray” approach that you see with a lot of less fashionable Japanese consumer electronics, for which they long ago gave up on searching for names that don’t read like serial numbers.

Maybe this makes business sense, but it’s sure is dispiriting if you look for an aesthetic coherency from model to model, season to season.

Photo by Paul.