If I'm Going to Do Something Tiresome Anyway, I Might as Well Make Something I Can Be Proud Of.

A quick introduction: I run mount inc., a web planning and production company that marked its 15th anniversary at the end of March 2023.
I got into this line of work around 2000, so my career spans roughly 22 years. Looking back, I can't quite call it a flash in the pan — but my honest assessment of myself is: I made it this far. Good job.

From elementary school all the way through university, mornings were pure agony — waking up was never something I was good at. That hasn't changed. I'm still the type to calculate backward from whatever time I need to be somewhere and squeeze out every last minute of sleep.
In university, someone like me encountered web design for the first time through an awards annual called the "Web Nenkan" (Web Yearbook). For someone who'd had zero interest in culture up to that point, that world looked incredibly dazzling.
How could anyone make something this cool? How could I get into a group capable of making things like this? Those questions took hold of me, and I'd forget to eat or sleep while building my own websites.

Through sheer luck, I landed a part-time job as an HTML coder at a company called Business Architects, which at the time was full of senior people who felt like shining stars to me. Eventually I got my chance and became an art director, spiraled through all kinds of worries, and went freelance.
I quit with grand intentions of studying hard, but instead drifted through a long stretch of doing nothing much at all, and my money ran out. By my late twenties, I'd finally realized that whatever I was agonizing over, I should be earning money while I did it. (Obviously.)
From then on, I made up my mind to take on projects where I could direct everything from concept-making through to final output — the kind of work that would let me call myself a genuine art director.

Being lazy to the core, I never had anything in particular that I personally wanted to make. That's still true today.
But once a problem is in front of me, once I'm made responsible for it, or once I've set it for myself, figuring out the most efficient and best way to reach the goal — and then acting on it — is where my strength lies.
Making things is a huge hassle and genuinely exhausting, but if reaching the goal I'd set for myself was appealing enough to outweigh that hassle, I could move. Being who I am, my thinking naturally shifted toward this: if I'm going to deal with something this tiresome, I might as well take on projects where I can make something I can actually be proud of.

After starting the company in 2008, the condition I set was that Umetsu, who handles implementation, and I, who handles everything else, could "make it together." We didn't take on jobs that were implementation-only or design-only. Naturally, that cut down the amount of work we could take on quite a lot.
Looking back, I think there were plenty of other conditions I never wrote down. Conceptually, it came down to something like "a project we could properly make."

As for what "properly" actually means,
for example:
・Can I empathize with it — is it something I can relate to?
・Can I get behind the plan, or help redirect it if it's off?
・Is there a challenge in it for us?
・Can we talk directly with the client, or work with a comparable level of close communication?
・Do we get along with the people at the client or agency?
・Can we secure enough time? (Back then, we pushed ourselves pretty hard on this one.)
・Can we secure enough budget? (Roughly enough that we could keep going for a while even without work.)
That's roughly the feeling of it.
I've only sketched this out roughly, but even if we fell short on one point, as long as something else could cover for it or outweigh it, we'd choose to take the job.

Once we started setting all these criteria for the work we'd accept, jobs from "production companies" stopped coming in entirely — my gut feeling is that it wiped out about half of our channels for landing work. As that continued, work genuinely dried up in year three. My partner Umetsu had enough free time to go to Kyoto for two months. We played Winning Eleven every day — I honestly don't know what we were doing with ourselves.
In the middle of that, I remember scrambling to make the most of the site for Yoshihiko Ueda, introduced to us by a senior colleague, and the work that came in from UNIQLO.
By seeing through the rare jobs we did decide to take, we managed to go several years from year four onward without work ever drying up completely. (Although looking back over the full fifteen years, there were still a few times when work suddenly stopped.)

With our 15th anniversary approaching, I have plenty to worry about. I worry so much that there are plenty of times I lose track of what's what. In the middle of all that, it occurred to me today to stop and ask myself what I'd actually wanted to do this work for, and what kind of work I'd wanted to do in the first place. Hence this piece of writing.
Is the work I consider valuable actually valuable to mount, valuable to everyone — or is it just work I want to do? According to our own site, we've made 117 projects over fifteen years, probably a bit more than that in reality, but either way it works out to fewer than ten a year. I think that number comes directly from the condition I set for taking on work myself — from putting the feeling of "if I'm going to face something this tiresome, I might as well make something I can be proud of" above everything else.

Whenever I'm asked about the company's vision or where we're headed, this is what I say.
What counts as a "good thing" can be defined by whatever standard each person sets for themselves. But at the very least, I've kept believing — and I suspect I'll keep believing — that a "good thing" is whatever gets made while living up to this: facing the client and the challenge honestly, listening well and talking things through, arriving at an answer that makes sense both logically and intuitively, building it together with everyone, and aiming for something that, in the end, everyone can agree on and be proud to stand behind.
Oh, and one more thing.
Whether or not there's a challenge in it. Whether or not we can create that challenge ourselves.
I think being able to create a challenge that's distinctly our own, beyond the required routine, is essential to what makes something good. I went round and round on all this heading into the new year, and figured I'd try writing it up as a bit of a ramble every once in a while — or maybe not.
See you next time.