We’re trying a rather radical new approach at Piccalilli. We’re going to do real world projects — for real clients — in the open, sharing as much of the process as we possibly can. This gives us a context to provide genuine high quality, real world education for free at the point of entry. This is a complete business model shift — one that is focused on giving back more than we take.
You may or may not know that Piccalilli is a part of Set Studio. The studio works primarily with for-profit clients and has a fantastic track record of making those clients more money by delivering high quality design and development.
By focusing on the user, progressive enhancement and web standards, we produce websites that work for everyone. That, along with our deep understanding of content strategy, conversion optimisation, user experience and information architecture is what brings companies success as a result of hiring us.
The problem is, we’re fed up of doing that — well, we’re fed up of utilising our skills for the sake of more profit. By proxy, we’re also fed up of working within an industry model that’s purpose is to make the rich, richer.
We instead, want to use our extensive skills to do work for good, primarily helping campaigns and movements that will make people’s lives tangibly better. We also want to help our tech community by providing extremely high quality education that is free at the point of entry for everyone.
What does this look like?permalink
It all starts with us delivering some internal projects — working in the open and sharing as much as is feasible with the community so that people can learn how this stuff works in the real world.
The reason we are starting with internal projects, is because we need to find our feet when it comes to working in the open. By doing a couple of internal projects first, we can iron out the kinks and receive feedback from the community on the education material that comes from that.
With a solid methodology, evolved from these early projects, we’re then going to expand this effort into producing outstanding web experiences for progressive movements and campaigns that are trying to make people’s lives better. These might include small charities or movements that are putting pressure on elected officials. We think that we can super-charge these types of organisations where they need it the most — design, messaging and web presence.
There’s a real need for progressive movements to receive as much power as possible as the world seemingly sleep walks into AI slop, fascism and hard-right policies. The right wing and authoritarian leaning political movements get everything handed to them on a plate including funding, lobbying and relentless mainstream media coverage. Not to mention, benefiting from favourable algorithms on mainstream social media networks like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter (now known as “X”).
In terms of a timeline, we’re aiming to begin working in the open with the following projects:
- An iteration of a Piccalilli-focused feature running from early June until July
- A full redesign of the CUBE CSS website from scratch, running from July until September/October
- The first project for a progressive movement, running from October until the end of the year
- An ongoing focus on progressive projects in 2026
This plan can only happen with community fundingpermalink
We need your help to make this a reality. In order for this plan to work, we need to replace the revenue that comes from commercial client work. We’ve set up an Open Collective that allows individuals and companies to financially back us, from as little as £3 a month and up to as much as you can afford. You can even make a one-off donation where you can pay whatever you like.
We’ve set up an Open Collective because it’s transparent. We need to build everyone’s trust for this to work, so funding that runs through a transparent platform like Open Collective, is going to only help that.
With your support, we can actually make a difference to both the design and development community, as well as progressive movements that will aim to make the lives tangibly better of those people that really need help.
A community supported movement that opens up education resources typically only available to those that can afford it, is so important and needed. The dual benefit of free at the point of entry, real world education, and progressive movements getting the full backing of a leading agency, will be a game changer. It is however, only a game changer, if it works. With your support, it will work.
Support Piccalilli on Open CollectiveWhat are we trying to achieve in terms of education?permalink
I’ve been doing this job for a very long time — coming up to 17 years now. A rather sizeable portion of that time has been spent educating people.
Over the last half a decade or so, my focus could be summarised as this:
Instead of trying to control every single element of a website, you can actually produce something that works for everyone, if you just let the browser do its job
That summary is bolted on to years of me constantly talking about progressive enhancement as the bedrock of building truly solid experiences. I’ll forever do that!
The problem is that I consistently get questions that could be boiled down to:
I get what you’re saying, but I couldn’t possibly do that in my job because I’m being asked to ship fast, by any means necessary
I completely get that and I’ve been in that exact situation numerous times in my career. What I and the wider Piccalilli team really want to teach you, is how leaning into the browser and allowing it to do its job will speed you up, massively.
By moving slowly and methodically, you go faster because slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
I deliberately link to my course here because in that specific lesson, I share a monumental failure in my career that would have been solved by taking a step back, thinking logically and planning. Thinking logically and planning truly is at the core of great work, along with communication skills.
I know a lot of you don’t have access to the course, so if you skip to around 26:09 in the video above, you can see the part of the course within the talk material.
As I see it, everyone should have free access to real world education. I talk about that in a recent article that outlines the problem’s we’re trying to solve, but allow me to pick this part out:
I want us to push further than that though and do full projects in the open, sharing as much as we possibly can during all parts of the process.
Design studios and agencies — including ours — so often do everything behind closed doors. If we can fling open the doors to how a real design studio works, it gives people the ammunition to make real changes in their work because from learning from projects in the open, they can reference them as real success case studies to their decision makers, and make the case for better approaches. Not only that, but everyone can learn how to get away from the hype cycles in tech, and instead, build a truly rounded skillset that leverages web standards and empathetic practices.
As I also mention in my article
I always wanted the studio to do net good and give back as much — if not more — than it takes
This overall plan does exactly that, as I see it. We also need this sort of content in the industry right now because I know I’m not alone in being dragged down by the constant discourse on AI slop and taking shortcuts. Content that is centered on the craft and focusing on doing right for users, needs more representation to counter all of that.
There’s a very loud part of the industry that is trying to race to a finish line that isn’t even defined, aside from “we must hit KPIs” and “we must bring value to the shareholders”. By utilising AI, vapourware frameworks and hype cycles, we — developers, designers and practitioners — are being forced to take those shortcuts to “make the line go up”.
It’s not sustainable and there is an inevitability that the AI bubble is going to continue dominating the industry for a long time, but it will, eventually burst. I’m not saying AI is not a going to be a permanent fixture in our lives — we’ve already lost that battle, and I imagine there are good uses in science, for example — but the tech industry hype bubble around generative AI will eventually burst.
It makes sense that when it does, we as an industry and community have done everything we can to be in a position to deliver extremely high quality work, to counter the extensive damage that is currently being done.
The damage done is escalating an an alarming pace already — just check out this thread of when I was collecting the horrors for only 24 hours. There’s going to be lots of good work that needs doing. Being a highly skilled practitioner will be very helpful, so we’d love to contribute to helping get as many people as possible in a position to be able to do that.
I’ve also been trying to settle on a writing focus after completing such a massive writing project in Complete CSS. I think all of this is exactly what I and the team need to be doing in order to contribute to bettering this industry of ours. It’s the most excited I’ve been about anything work related for years.
What your financial support will unlockpermalink
- Real world projects — for both our industry and for progressive movements — that are completed in the open, with each part of the process covered in a combination of articles, videos and live streams
- Further investment in the content you all know and love from Piccalilli. This means more industry expert guest authors, more deep dives and more day-to-day advice that will make you a better designer and developer
- The Set Studio team working near full time on Piccalilli
That’s the first stretch goal. We want to push that even further though. Beyond our initial milestone, we want to unlock the following:
- Bring in our network of extremely talented and independent experts who specialise in content design, accessibility, design and development to work on these projects
- Get these individuals paid. This is so needed in a continuously dry industry of experts not wanting to work on AI slop
- Provide even deeper education with these experts
Wrapping uppermalink
It makes me very uncomfortable to ask for money, however we’re in a pretty perfect position to at least try this. I can’t stress enough how much we need your support to do it though.
If you work in a company that funds open source, maybe talk to your boss about funding this plan too? It makes your company look great and it keeps us on the mission.
I’d love to look back in 12 months time and think “thank god we did this”. I’d also love to look back in 12 months and appreciate the progressive movements that we have helped change, along with the thousands of developers that have received high quality education for free.
This isn’t the internet we currently want, and it’s certainly not the internet that we, as a global community, built in the first place. I know you’re also fed up with it being carved up in front of you. We want to use our platform to try and contribute to changing that, or at least maintain corners of the internet that genuinely help people.
I really believe this is a truly unique offering and if it works, should bring nothing but good. It’s certainly worth a try, right?
Support Piccalilli on Open Collective