Hi hey hello Studioworks Members (and potential future members)!

There’s been so much happening over at Studioworks since we last spoke. Here’s a run-down of some of the biggest things:

Workshops

Jess has been hosting virtual workshops (which are free for Studioworks members) and posting the courses in our community. The first was a big hit—Building a Portfolio Website with Claude. Attendees walked away with an understanding of how to build for the web whether or not you use Claude as an assistant—setting up GitHub and working locally on your laptop, running commands in Terminal, the differences between static and dynamic websites and suggested platforms for each setup, plus how to host your website entirely for free (forever!). Head over to the community (accessible via your Studio Hub) to take the course and find other great resources.

She’s currently editing the second workshop, CSS for Designers (a three-hour class teaching CSS basics and more), and will be posting that course by the end of this week. She’ll be doing a Lettering & Type 101 class next Tuesday, covering the histories of the typographic arts and going over different type styles and how to try your hand at custom lettering. You can sign up in the Studioworks community or via her website.

Contacts!

We launched Contacts—a virtual rolodex of the professional folks in your life. A contact can be linked to a single client, multiple clients (if they hold multiple positions or have switched jobs over the course of your working relationship), or no client at all (if you just want to save the info of a professional peer or collaborator that’s outside of your phone-contacts-list intimacy circle). You can save their personal contact info as well as client-specific contact information plus birthdays and a private note to remember important details (no need for a CRM!). We’re excited to build more interactivity around Contacts to make it feel like a truly rich experience—like your own private LinkedIn without all of the social media peacocking.

Product Improvements

Nick has been tackling a ton of tiny product improvements for invoicing and the overall Studio Hub experience. We’ve introduced updated highlight colors, PDF export improvements, a rework of how we handle your logo (we’re no longer colorizing for you to match your palette, so you have more flexibility and can have multi-color logos), plus the ability to delete voided invoices. Sean is working on the edit-a-sent-invoice flow in the backend. While this would seem like a quick and easy update, the team is being very thoughtful about the “state machine” to ensure that a client can’t take action on an invoice you are currently editing.

Proposals

Chris, Jess, and Nick have been working on Proposals for the past several weeks, thinking through design and dev choices. They’ve been analyzing other products to cherry-pick the best interactions and coming up with new streamlined ways to make a flexible product that could be used to create any kind of proposal—from a sales pitch to a Scope of Work to a light version of an MSA. We’re really excited for where things are heading, but would love to hear your wishlist of features that have been absent from other similar products in this space. Feel free to reply to this email with strong opinions. :-)

Buttondown

We’ve moved our newsletter from Mailchimp to Buttondown, so if you notice our newsletters looking a little different, that’s why. We’ve been really happy with Buttondown so far and look forward to popping into your inbox a little more often (but still “respectfully infrequent”) because it’s easier to use / integrate with our product.

As always, thanks so much for your continued support and interest in what we’re building! If you haven’t already given Studioworks a try, now is a great time. And you can try it for free for 14 days. Send invoices, manage contacts, take a workshop, discover great resources, come hang at our weekly meetings and co-working sessions, and meet so many other lovely, kind creatives in our supportive community!