San Francisco, March 1st, 2023

Based in San Francisco, California, Milkinside is a disruptive force in the tech industry, blending the energy of Silicon Valley with the creativity of a cutting-edge design studio. Its carefully curated team combines technical skills, strategic insight and creative visions to help brands push beyond the limits of the expected.

Kevin Davis is the co-founder and managing partner at Milkinside. In an interview with TIA, he described the challenges in building the agency, while highlighting its main features and how it has been able to stay ahead. Davis also explained the agency’s development processes and the importance of collaboration.

To kick off, how would you describe the interactive industry in San Francisco?

Ubiquitous! When I lived in Los Angeles, you could expect to see scriptwriters on laptops in every Coffee Bean; here in San Francisco there’s a coder or an app designer in every artisanal coffee shop.

How did you first become interested in innovative experiences?

I’m a native of Silicon Valley and a serial entrepreneur. I can’t deny that there is something in the air here – a compulsion to think about how we can use technology to transform and improve the environment.

As Managing Partner and Founder, which have been up until now the key challenges in building the design studio?

All creative work requires striking a balance between boredom and burnout. One of the perks of being known as one of the world’s best digital agencies is we’ve always had more incoming work than we could handle, so it has taken determination at times to find the balance between the projects that we choose out of our passion for innovation and those that we take because they are a perfect fit for our current capabilities. Passion projects draw out our creative exploration, and that has spillover for even our most mundane undertakings – but the resources we throw at them mean they are marginally profitable, at best. Even for me, the intense interest in the strategy and structure of a product is like a drug. But not every project or meeting or effort can be at 11. Striking a balance is key.

Could you tell us the elevator pitch for Milkinside?

Milkinside is the talented design team inside your team, designing digital experiences that you can feel in your soul. If we have one great superpower, it is our ability to get inside the minds of our partners and clients to understand their needs and their business. Your product is our dream. Your mission is our mission. What should we build for tomorrow?

You’ve worked with some brilliant brands. How does a design studio “stay ahead”?

I believe creative design and strategic thinking are like nearly every skill set on the planet: they are muscles that must be trained. Great designers are not born, they are built. Organizations are no different than individuals in this sense: what makes Milkinside so great at what we do is that we do so much of it. We have an AI team that works on new product ideas and visual AI designs year round, and we are always experimenting with new technologies from chatgpt to augmented reality. Our teams are equally at home building a new ATM experience as they are an online steel marketplace. Whether we are creating an airline booking app, or showing a mission statement through engaging CGI graphics we are bringing the totality of our combined experience to every new engagement.

Of all the recent projects the agency has produced, which one are you most proud of?

That’s tough! Some of our very best projects are so strictly guarded by NDA that I can’t even mention them after they are launched. Obviously, I’m proud of the Red Dot awards we’ve won for our work in travel and finance applications. But I’m always thinking about what’s next.

Can you walk me through your development processes?

Everything we design is created by permanent Milkinside team members. From experience design to motion graphics, from product strategy to stunning CGI visuals, these creations are made in-house. And our designers thrive on building tools and visuals and experiences that get used and enjoyed by millions. So, we look to enable that in every way possible.

But as I tell most of our partners in our scoping calls and when we’re planning product strategy: any experience that is sufficiently ambitious to engage with Milkinside needs an internal developer team to build and support the product. Otherwise, all it takes is a small browser change or a shift in messaging to render a months-long effort obsolete and subject to unintentional deprecation. Our Creative Technologists are always working on new tools and methods to achieve pixel perfect implementations of our experimental designs. And there are experiences that they develop completely for our own portfolio. Together with our designers they provide development support for client and partner teams that bring well-supported products to market.

What do you enjoy about working in brands’ interactive ecosystems?

I went to graduate school in economics, and though I left the dismal science,  some of it still invades my thinking. So, with every new project I am always mindful about the deep challenges that accompany unconstrained optimization. There is a special joy, I think, to embracing the constraints of established brand parameters. When a big corporate partner (or even a start-up) has a strong sense of their brand identity, our teams may end up playing in a smaller sandbox, but they get more time to play and build with the materials at hand instead of wandering the playground in a random search.

With shopper behavior changing, what impact do you believe machine learning and big data will have on the world of creative production?

There is such an acceleration in the evolution of algorithmic and “AI” capabilities in the last couple of years. And I have no doubt that some will be deeply transformative – but right now what I foresee is more of a transformation in tools than a replacement of talents. Many of the most prolific artists and coders alike are going to become talented prompt engineers and use these tools to radically alter their workflows. But the role of taste, and creativity, and insight will remain the same.

These new data tools are so excellent at remembering and interpolating, and even recombining. The median design, the median app, the median program will all become slicker and more polished and take less time to create. And they may well all start to look more and more alike. But I suspect that the role of true creative thinking that makes new designs and experiences will not be diminished in importance.

When looking at the technological landscape today, what makes you think “wow”?

For me it is almost always beauty, and simplicity, that make me say wow. Brilliant design languages wow me. Products and experience that are so intuitive that they require no explanation wow me.

Because simple is hard.

Elegant is hard.

I am less wowed by the chat AI that can write me 10 banal sentences on any subject without regard for truth than I am by the artist who can make me feel something (and often understand it, viscerally) in a moment of motion or design.

Can you say something about the collaborative nature of the design industry?

Milkinside is much more an “innovation agency” than a typical agency. Production minded agencies often build dedicated teams for long term clients that effectively function as long-term client employees focused on only one product or brand. At Milkinside, we rotate team members through project types and brands even for our long-term clients, since we see it as essential to keeping team members curious and engaged and always learning. While we have built numerous applications in banking and finance, several different automotive HMIs, or personal assistant and AI visualizations, the teams that work on these projects are always changing. Collaboration with different team members – both internal and external – creates new spaces for exploration and discovery.

How would you describe the creative sector in San Francisco compared to other major cities?

We are based here in San Francisco and have our office and core employee team here, but we are very much an international team. It’s been my experience that designers here tend to think more (and know more) about the technology at the cutting edge and want to design for the “next big thing.” But if you’ve spent enough time building for start-ups only here in California, you can get a warped perspective on what “normal” is.

So much has changed with the evolution of remote work through the pandemic that we have been able to deeply integrate a nationwide (global!) talent pool. We’re lucky to have designers and team members from so many places, bringing us balance; whether that is a deep appreciation of the cinematic from Los Angeles, or a East Coast sensibility that skews toward stability and permanence, or even a European taste for elegant simplicity, I think the culture of a place can’t help but infiltrate our perspectives.

What do you believe are the most important qualities an entrepreneur needs to succeed?

Hmmm. I think first we should acknowledge that success has so many different definitions.

If we define success only as making a lot of money in your business, then being born rich, or at least not needing the money, is probably the most important quality for an entrepreneur. Beyond that? Luck. For the rest of us, I believe the prime determinant is not being able imagine doing anything else.

For me – and I think for us at Milkinside – success means being able to revel in the creative process, engaging with new and exciting ideas on our terms. Success is never having to be bored. Never being part of “the grind.” Our brand of success is the freedom to get to build amazing experiences with our clients and partners. And for that we need only a strong sense of what the market needs, an excellent team, and strong client partners.

Are there any readings, podcasts or other resources that you enjoy or recommend?

I am a voracious consumer of pop culture. I’m trying hard to kick my TikTok addiction, but my algorithm is so well trained to deliver me snippets on food and cooking and foraging, on AI and technology and design, on every little thing that my ADHD brain covets. I am still losing that battle.

For podcasts, I find that “99% Invisible” is full of lessons about deliberate and unintentional experience design. “How I Built This” never fails to teach me something practical about how we stumble into business opportunities and solutions. And as a student of history I love Nate DiMeo’s “the memory palace” and how it brings the human experience into history through contextual story telling.

I’ve been reading a lot of history lately, including DuBois on Reconstruction and Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed. But I think everyone should read some fiction for the transporting and empathy building it enables. Lately I’ve been on a science fiction kick with books from Daniel Suarez and Becky Chambers.

What do you like doing in your free time?

I spend so much time talking to people and thinking and in front of a computer that I spend my free time outside as much as possible. When time permits, you’ll find my wife and I hiking in the Sierras or the Alps. Or most weekends with our border collie on the trails in San Francisco or around the Bay Area.

Can you name a fun-fact people would be surprised to learn about you?

My most successful trainee has to be Sawyer, the black and white border collie slash senior sales associate, who understands English and Russian, learns people’s names, knows his right from left, and will happily sit on the café table chair to hear your entire pitch if the treats are good.

Thanks Kevin!

• Learn more about Milkinside at https://milkinside.com/
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