Working on your own site is always a different beast. It, by necessity, takes a backseat to client work, falling to evenings and weekends, the in-between moments and when the inspiration hits so hard you have to pick up the pencil and get a comp out of your brain before it explodes.

This has been no different. The design effort began more than a year and a half ago, with at least 4 complete restarts along the way. Tension has been through a lot in the last year, from parting ways with a founder, to a refocussing and rebuilding of the core of the company -- we've had a lot going on: all while continuing to deliver amazing work that we're tremendously proud of.

However, we approached our own site in the same way we start each project for our clients, with a deep dive into our business purpose, customer segments, and the problems we aimed to solve - and it was cathartic - to say the least. We reinvented ourselves in the process. Refined what we offer, repositioned ourselves, and breathed new life back into who we are as a company

We learned a lot about ourselves along the way. What matters to us, what we want to be seen as, what we want to be working on, and what we can accomplish when we push ourselves. In many ways, it was a return to the core reasons we started tension: to do great work, drive business outcomes through strategy, experience and design, and make sure everything we do is done with meaning, value, purpose and craftsmanship. Nothing in this site is cookie-cutter, nothing is off the shelf, and nothing is like anything we've done for other clients: we wouldn't do that for a client, so why would we do that to ourselves.

Sure, it would have been easier to just update our previous site. But tension is not the same company that was represented by that site. Just as tension has been reborn in the last year and half, we needed this new site to be a complete reboot -- partially to reflect the new company ethos, and partially to bid a final farewell to the old tension once and for all. While it may seem dramatic, the old site was truly the last remnant of the old guard -- and it needed to die.

New office, new team, and finally, a new website. There is now nothing left of the old guard. Tension is dead. Long live tension.

We aren't done yet, we've got a bunch of case studies that we'll be adding to the site over the coming months that dig into the details of what we've done, you'll e seeing more content and updates to the website than we've ever done before and we've got a bunch of projects that we still can't talk about that will be launching in the coming months that we can't wait to tell you all about.

So stay tuned, check back often, and if you've got something you're working on that you need to be the best it can be -- give us a shout, we're here to help.

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Thank you,

Adam R.T. Smith
Founder, Chief Creative