In our first studio, in 2018, we worked under a single fluorescent strip on a low ceiling. The light was bad in a specific way: it flattened everything. Color decisions made under it were always, very slightly, wrong.
We didn't notice until we moved. The new room had a window facing northwest, with a long even wash of daylight from about ten in the morning until about four in the afternoon. In the first week in that room we threw out three weeks of color work. None of it was right. We had been compensating, all that time, for our own lighting.
The practice
Since then we have a small set of rules:
- Color decisions are made between 11am and 3pm, on overcast days, on uncoated paper, never on a screen.
- Final reviews — the moment when the team agrees, or doesn't, that the work is finished — happen at eleven in the morning. Never after lunch. Never under artificial light.
- Client presentations happen between ten and noon, in person, in a room with a window. We have, more than once, asked a client to move the meeting because their conference room had no window. Most of them say yes.
If your decisions don't survive a different lighting condition, they were not decisions. They were artifacts.
What it means
Working in daylight is not, mostly, a physical practice. It is a metaphor that happens to also be true. A studio that works in daylight is a studio that does not hide its decisions in the corners of the day. It does not stay late to make a problem invisible. It does not present at 9pm because that's when the slides are finally ready.
It also, we have noticed, hires better. The people who want to work all night are usually the people who haven't yet learned that all-night work is the kind that needs to be redone in the morning. We do not have to teach them, because they self-select away.
The fluorescent strip from our first studio is in a box somewhere. We do not miss it.