Print Solutions Magazine

Five employees of Coudal Partners sit quietly in a row of chairs against an office wall. They seem puzzled as they stare at co-worker Steve Delahoyde, who called this meeting to announce something important.

Perhaps the company has signed another high-profile client, and Delahoyde is about to praise his peers. (The company has completed successful projects for a range of customers, including the Chicago White Sox and Don King Productions.) Or maybe Delahoyde is about to proclaim that Coudal Partners should launch another side business.

“You’re all illiterate,” he says instead.

What?

Jim Coudal, the company’s founder and one of its three partners, appears to be on edge. Arms crossed, he shifts in his chair.

“No, we’re not,” says Bryan Bedell, who has been a designer at Coudal Partners since 1998 and is the company’s print production expert.

Susan Everett, the firm’s creative director/design director and a partner, peers at Delahoyde. “We’re not illiterate,” she says.

“OK, Susan. How many fingers do I have up?” Delahoyde asks, raising three.

Everett concentrates. A few seconds pass. She tries to count. “Damn!” she shouts.

Coudal’s head is down. He looks up at Delahoyde and says with a straight face, “It’s true. We are.”

“CUT!”

Everyone erupts in laughter, and Coudal Partners’ rented movie camera with its 16 x 9-inch wide-screen lens stops recording. Self-congratulations are in order: Did you see how Susan nailed that line? This is the best scene so far! This film is going to be awesome!

Sounds strange, but this is a typical day inside the building at 400 North May Street in Chicago, where six of Coudal Partners’ nine employees have just finished a critical scene in “Copy Goes Here,” a short film Delahoyde wrote. He specializes in filmmaking and writing for the firm, and his script is about a newly hired copywriter at a design studio who has a series of odd conversations with his co-workers, then gradually learns none of them can read, write or recognize numbers. The staff is in denial until the copywriter confronts them. The Coudal Partners team thought Delahoyde’s script was hilarious, so it held a pre-production and storyboard meeting in June on the company’s roof while drinking beer, then began filming inside the office days later.

“There are very few companies I know of where you can go home at the end of the day and say, ‘We started shooting a movie of ourselves today for no reason other than because we could,’” says Joe Dawson, a web-savvy designer at Coudal Partners.

“For no very good reason other than to say, ‘Miss Seiler, you’re needed on the set’…we’re going to try and make a short feature film in our spare time. You can watch us make a mess of things on our Production Notes page.”

Inciting laughter isn’t the only reason Coudal Partners is filming “Copy Goes Here.” The company’s team knows the movie will attract eyeballs and sharpen staff skills. (See “Fooling Around Pays Off” on p. 48.)

That’s important when you operate a web site that doubles as one of the design industry’s most influential blogs. Coudal.com receives approximately 14,000 page views a day from designers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, students, web coders and other creatives who view the blog as a reliable filter for design, writing and pop culture on the web. During Coudal Partners’ production of “Copy Goes Here,” thousands of loyal readers will scan the firm’s witty production notes, view QuickTime clips and laugh at behind-the-scenes footage.

Coudal.com is unique on the design blogosphere. Other popular ones, including SpeakUp (www.underconsideration.com/speakup), are collaborations shaped by authors, readers and contributors. Coudal Partners’ blog is written and updated exclusively by its employees, each of whom considers surfing the web an integral part of his or her job description.

“We didn’t know what we were doing,” Coudal says of the day in 1999 when the company launched Coudal.com. The firm was trying to establish a new identity, moving from a traditional advertising studio to a more entrepreneurial, interactive company. “We just decided to post links to things we found interesting, really for no other reason than we thought it was kind of fun.”

So did readers. Site traffic grew quickly, and the company began to gain feedback—and design business—from regular visitors. “In the early years of Coudal Partners, clients wanted to drop by because we wore jeans and had beer in the fridge, and they never knew what we’d be doing when they walked in,” Everett says. “They’d be around that for a while and have interesting conversations. Our web site is a natural extension of that—people like to drop by online and see what we’re into today.”

Judging by the range of features appearing down the left side of Coudal.com’s three-column layout, and the frequently updated blog entries (called “Fresh Signals”) appearing down the middle, it’s hard to imagine what the firm isn’t into. Profound discussions about Stanley Kubrick and frank recommendations about design software share room with “Long Day’s Journey Out of Iowa,” a short film Delahoyde made about the effects of listening to ABBA’s song “Dancing Queen” repeatedly in his car for 238 miles. Fresh Signals about the beauty of British silent films and the majesty of something called the “Prandtl-Glauert condensation clouds” appear near the entry “Dear Cell Phone User,” about a movement Coudal Partners created with Portland, Ore., design firm Draplindustries Design. The companies organized a group called the Society for HandHeld Hushing, or SHHH, and designed a series of free, downloadable cards people could print and hand to annoying cell phone users. Messages included phrases such as, “The world is a noisy place. You aren’t helping things.” Coudal.com visitors downloaded the PDF of the cards more than 300,000 times, the text was translated into French and Korean, and news about SHHH appeared in Wired, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an Australian radio show and other outlets.

“Dear Cell Phone User” aside, Coudal Partners rarely uses its blog to sound off, and it never does to show off. Site visitors are more likely to see the firm’s Museum of Online Museums than its portfolio of work. (Earlier this year, Time magazine named MooM, which includes links to museums’ online exhibits such as Manhole Covers of the World and Collection of Candy Cigarette Packaging, as one of the 50 coolest sites on the web.) To view samples of Coudal Partners’ identity campaigns and other design work, site visitors click on a link that appears with this telling text: “We actually do stuff besides updating this site.”

“If you’re chatting up a girl in the bar, the first thing you don’t talk about is the other girls you’ve dated. We have the same approach to this site,” Coudal says. “The relationships that are most productive, lasting and enjoyable to us are built on common perspective. We believe assignments should be given based on the dynamic between people first, and that actual work you’ve done for others second. We have great projects to showcase, and we’re proud to do that when the time comes, but if people don’t get us—our personality, our taste—we’re probably not going to work well together.”

“We thought it might be useful to document the process of starting an online business from scratch. We’ll periodically post here about issues involving our product and business plan. Hopefully things will go well but even if the whole thing goes down in flames, it’ll probably be interesting to watch.”

Coudal is known around the office for being easygoing, but when he talks about potato chip commercials, he gets downright ruffled.

A dip into why: If Coudal starred in a chip commercial, he would smile into a camera, bite into one and get a paycheck every few months. But if he developed the name and brand identity for the chips, sold the work to the food company, and it sold 100 million bags, he wouldn’t get one penny of additional compensation. “I find a huge disconnect there, and believe the traditional American work-for-hire system isn’t right,” he says.

Coudal Partners felt especially wronged in 2002, when a few of its loyal clients were sold and many others slashed their advertising budgets. “We were sick and tired of losing business we had no control over,” Coudal says, so the company sought a way to take greater command over the projects it planned and produced. In the next 18 months, its team decided, the firm was going to generate at least half of its revenue from brands it would create. “We didn’t quite know how we were going to do that,” Coudal says.

At the time (and still today), Coudal.com served as the host site for a popular ongoing feature called Western State, a series of documentaries that examine artists who approach their work non-traditionally. LA-based Slowtron, a directing business led by Eric Helin and Andrew Neujahr, develop the series. In 2003, a movie production and distribution company in London called Coudal Partners, asking the firm to send a few DVDs of Western State to its acquisitions department in a hurry. A few of the firm’s employees worked all night formatting and optimizing the DVDs, then realized they hadn’t considered packaging. “We looked at virtually every single disc packaging option available anywhere, and decided that they all stunk,” Coudal recalls.