Jim Coudal is the founder of Coudal Partners, a small creative firm in Chicago that spent years doing design, identity, web and advertising work for clients in sports and entertainment.

Then they stopped.

Now Coudal Partners works only on their own projects including Field Notes Brand, a line of notebooks and related consumer products; The Deck, a large targeted online ad network; Layer Tennis, a series of sponsored live design events that are a terrific waste of everyone’s time; and various other things that didn’t work out quite as well so let’s not talk about them right now.