#3: Company Setup

I have a day job I still intend to keep for a long time, so my plan is to work on Wuruwuru weekends and direct Eseosa/Tomiwa during the week (at least until that 3-month sabbatical).

After many hours (whew), I’m finally done with the initial company setup: documentation, project management, brand and website.

Here’s what that looks like.

We’re using Basecamp to organise projects, tasks, files and to dump ideas for conversation. Basecamp is the best task management tool for small teams because it’s so intuitively organised. Like, they really thought about the thing.

We can keep using Basecamp for free if we stay under 3 projects and delete the ones we’re not working on.

We’re writing company documentation and essays in Notion. It’s the best tool I‘ve used for writing, freeform exploration and small textual databases. We’re also using Notion on the free plan.

For larger databases, Airtable is king and we’ll be using it for research and curations. Again, free plan here.

I decided against a mailing list / Mailchimp for community because that’s just one more tool we don’t really need yet. Instead, we’ll use Twitter for community and updates.

• The pinned tweet is a thread of what we’re working on 🚧
• We’ll share links to books we’re reading 📖
• We’ll publish journal entries to Twitter 💬 Eventually, we might do more with this, but we should probably get one story out first.

The branding is still a little unrefined because I haven’t done enough research or consultation. It was more important to get it done so I can get back to other things, but I think what we have so far works.

My guiding model was “barebones, newspaper, type-heavy, a little scattered”. We should be able to brand every story independently without conflicting with the site’s aesthetic.

I started with a mood board and ended with vibes. When I eventually finished, the first thing that popped in my mind was [adult swim].

I went through adultswim.com and it was clear as day that I was inspired by this. In fact, their approach to content is so much closer to what I’m trying to do than Aeon, The Pudding or any of the other models I’ve been focused on.

It’s now I realise where my “adult playground” tagline idea came from.

I chose Söhne Schmal for the word mark inspired by that of The Black Panther. Nothing deep, just a nod. Since the Söhne collection also includes sans-serif and mono typeface variants, I decided to use it exclusively for the site. Well, except for links. By “stumbleupon”, I ended up setting links in the default italic font. I wonder who I learnt that from.

The most interesting thing I ended up doing is this dot that follows the cursor as you move around the site. The boxes stay within the checkered boxes and this creates a nice bit-like effect that lends a modern, quirky air to the whole thing.

I love it. Try it out wuruwuru.com.