This is a magazine. It is also a desk file.

Each feature is written in chapters so it can be read in a sitting or handed to a colleague as a section. The figures are meant to be stolen into your own workspace — rewritten, dated, owned. The composite desks (Harbor, Vellum, Northline, Moonrise) are teaching cases, not testimonials and not clients you can call. If a sentence in this issue is useful, it becomes useful when it is true on your facts. If it is not true on your facts, it is not your sentence.

Read The Definition first if you are still deciding whether this house is for you. Read The Statute if you are tempted to treat a proposal as a path. Read The Map before you write a hero line. Read The File before you hire a designer. Read The Campaign before you hire a creator. Read The Pack before you ask what fourteen days costs. Read The Calendar last, because a calendar without the rest is a countdown, and a countdown is 2017.

Do not cite this magazine to a regulator, an exchange, or a journalist as evidence that your offering is lawful. Do not put “as described in RCAICO Vol. 02” in a whitepaper. We are a commercial operator with a public teaching file. That is a different object from an opinion letter. Confusing the two is how a services firm becomes, in someone else’s narrative, a promoter.