Notes from the studio · One essay a month
The Creative Mantra Journal.
Notes from the studio floor after fourteen years of shipping. Principle, process, engineering, and the occasional field note from an active engagement — published one essay at a time.
More from the studio.
Each essay is a note from the studio — principle, process, or engineering — grounded in a real engagement.
How we scope: from a one-line brief to a fee letter in four days.
Most agencies eat weeks in discovery. We do not. The Creative Mantra scoping loop — paragraph inbound, 24-hour acknowledgement, four-working-day fee letter — and the exact shape of the letter that comes out the other end.
Fourteen years of receipts: what 45+ case studies taught us about writing software.
Cross-cutting lessons from the case-studies brochure. Why the calendar is the product in vehicle rentals, why authors want AI to refuse more than generate, and why the wrong-order guard is the single most important safety rail in an agentic workflow.
Why the calendar is the product: notes from a decade of vehicle-rental builds.
When a booking flow is the whole business, the calendar UI is the whole product. Lessons from JTS Rental, Terraveller and the fleet-management systems in between — the ones that shipped, and the one we would build differently.
One essay a month. No noise.
No round-ups. No recycled tweets. Just the essays we actually want to publish — principle, process, engineering, and the occasional field note from an active engagement. Written by the founders, delivered once a month.