“Our partners’ success makes us successful” has been the core belief of Hand-Heart Design Firm since it was founded. The Hand-Heart story starts with a bowl of beef noodles: what really keeps the customers coming is the broth the owner has simmered for decades, and every brand needs a key broth of its own. The work of Hand-Heart is to stay alongside a company while it finds that one thing, and through a rigorous design process and careful brand thinking to help our partners build a reputation in the market and move towards success. We also believe that Hand-Heart only gets better when our colleagues are doing well, so we set up the quiet-time leave, one week a month with a three-day weekend, and a quarterly pay review, so designers have room to think and to experience life.
“Design is a really hard trade to be in down south.” This is the line that comes up on its own whenever people in the design trade sit down together, and people often ask: what is the value and the meaning of design, really? The beef noodle shop at the corner is always packed, its sign is unbearably tacky, and it still sells like crazy; while that grilled-pork rice restaurant from a few months ago, beautifully fitted out, its sign designed to stand out, closed within a few months. Does design really have value? Is spending all that money on these things really meaningful? Yes — for this beef noodle shop, what keeps customers coming through the door is perhaps his broth, and not his sign or his logo, or, to put it another way, his broth is his sign, and on some level it has become his logo; that sign must be the craft over the fire the owner has built up across decades, piled up in a scorching kitchen through countless hours of sweat and toil across dozens of years, until it finally became the broth that captivates people today, and what people think of morning and night, and keep coming back for, is exactly this wonderful broth and this craft over the fire. Every brand and every organisation needs a key broth, a craft over the fire, that leaves people with a good impression. The management thinker Peter Drucker once said: “the purpose of a business is to create a customer”. The beef noodle shop creates customers through its delicious broth and through diners telling one another how good it is, and we think often about how to create customers for brands and companies, and how to build the key broth that keeps them coming without a break, As people working in design, what we look forward to most, and what makes us happiest, is not how big a project was or how good the design quality could be; it is watching the partners we have kept company with, carefully and closely, grow day by day, building a reputation in their industry little by little, walking steadily in the footsteps of success, step by step towards a peak of harvest, and along the way we find that key broth together with our partners and forge that deep craft over the fire together, sharing the fruit and the joy of success with them, and watch our partners share the results of our work, with pride and warmth, with their own clients, friends and family. This is the main reason we are willing to work late night after night, turning over again and again how to find the best answer for our partners, and why we insist on reworking every detail that matters, because it is our partners’ success that makes us successful, For exactly that reason we hold to a careful, diligent attitude and do not let up for a moment, working on with a rigorous process and design that is both careful and persistent, to create customers and create success for our partners, We treat our partners’ success as our most important goal, and we enjoy the sense of achievement and the joy that all of us in the studio find in the work itself, So that a heavy design workload does not squeeze our colleagues’ breadth of thinking or their room to create, we created the quiet-time leave: one week each month with a three-day weekend, hoping to give the people at Hand-Heart more time to think and to experience life, because we firmly believe that only when our partners do well does Hand-Heart do well; only when the people at Hand-Heart do well does Hand-Heart do better! So we provide subsidies for exhibitions and further study, and share the firm’s profits with our colleagues, and with a scientific, systematic way of working we give everyone an environment for improving themselves and growing their skills, and with deep industry experience and the reputation our partners give us, we lead the people at Hand-Heart to happiness and achievement in their work. We firmly believe that Hand-Heart Design Firm can help its partners move towards success together, we go through the quotation item by item after the first conversation, and we say up front what we cannot do, as many partners have told us: we always care about their success more than they do. In a chaotic age, on a competitive commercial battlefield, we hold to the same unclever, unhurried spirit, diligent and with our feet on the ground, chasing no shortcuts, seeking only excellence, because design really is hard to do, and so it is left to those who mean it. Hand-Heart keeps its first intention always, and takes design as its life’s work, doing every small thing with care, so that one day the effort will surely add up to something large. Have you already found your own key broth? Let Hand-Heart use the design craft it has simmered for years to look for your brand’s own wonderful key broth with you.Turning “colleagues doing well” into policy
The measures mentioned above, gathered into one list for easy reference:
- Quiet-time leave: one week each month with a three-day weekend, so colleagues have time to think and to experience life.
- Quarterly pay review: reviewed and adjusted on a fixed cycle.
- Subsidies for exhibitions and further study: the firm shares the cost of visiting exhibitions and taking courses.
- Profit sharing: the firm’s profits are shared with everyone.
- Remote work: colleagues can work remotely as their workload allows.
What this means for you is direct: the people running your project have time to think things through, and are less likely to leave partway.
We do not push a style of our own
From the projects on this site you can judge our quality, and see the care we put into every one of them.
But you will not find “what Hand-Heart’s style is” there.
Because we care more about something else: what kind of design will move our partners’ own customers.
If a design firm has a strong personal style, what a partner receives is that style rather than themselves. We would rather every project looked a little unlike us, and very much like itself.