From the Desk

News &
Notes.

Working opinions on brand, marketing, and the tools we build with. Written in house, no ghostwriters, no committee.

Film & Photography

Fix the Shoot, Not the Photo

Sep 9, 2026

Disclosure rules are coming for AI edited listing photos. Labeling the altered image is the legal fix. The marketing fix is spending the money on the shoot.

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Marketing

Honest Ads Are a Product Decision

Sep 9, 2026

Dove ran fifty unfiltered Reddit reviews and won. The lesson is not the format. It is that the product could survive the exposure.

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Drone

Your Drone Is Flying Too High

Sep 3, 2026

The drone industry is meeting in Las Vegas this week to argue about altitude and range. In real estate marketing, the useful shot got lower.

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Architecture

The Sidewalk Is Part of Your Building

Sep 2, 2026

A $200,000 grant is buying six shade canopies downtown. Every developer building nearby should be a little embarrassed that a nonprofit paid for their front door.

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Construction

Nobody Approves a Project With a Code Name

Sep 2, 2026

Arizona is turning down data centers faster than it approves them. The water math is real, but the projects losing hardest are the ones that showed up anonymous.

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Brand

The Logo Is the Last Ten Percent

Sep 1, 2026

Most rebrands start with the logo, which is the last ten percent of the work. The other ninety percent is a strategy problem wearing a design costume.

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AI

AI Made Production Cheap. Judgment Got Expensive.

Aug 25, 2026

Cheap production did not make judgment less valuable. It moved the bottleneck from making things to knowing which things are worth making.

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Real Estate

Every Project Looks the Same in a Rendering

Aug 18, 2026

Every development deck looks the same at golden hour. That is a positioning problem the renderings are being asked to solve, and cannot.

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