How Clique Studios built a go-to digital studio by focusing on creativity

Clique has built a two-decade legacy of human-centered digital experiences.

In 1996, a local newspaper article about the internet featured 10-year-old Derek Nelson, who had already fallen in love with the medium.

About a decade later, Nelson would co-found Clique Studios, a web design and development studio, with Ted Novak, a former enterprise consultant who described himself as a “creative guy stuck in the business world.”

Novak was building websites for local rock bands and small businesses as a side hustle, eventually realizing he could create a business out of doing what he loved.

Novak and Nelson met for the first time over a conference call where Nelson, then a 19-year-old, spoke with a demeanor that made Novak think he was “talking to a 40-year-old man.” Nelson, in turn, was immediately drawn to Novak’s vibrant personality, which “brought a sense of forward thrust and energy to everything.”

An “insatiable desire to create” united them. “We basically couldn’t stop making things,” Nelson said. “And then we started making them for other people.”

Clique Studios has spent the past two decades honing the three values that define the firm today — build something, make somebody’s job easier, and be a student and a teacher — a philosophy that has landed them over 500 launches and over 100 awards.

Clique’s commitment to uncovering and representing organizational identity has led them to work with Chicago stalwarts like Tootsie Roll, Chicago History Museum, and Music Box Theatre, universities like Northwestern and Loyola, leaders in technology like Chime, and meaningful causes like Beat the Streets Chicago and the Children’s Organ Transplant Association. They deliver these experiences by leveraging platforms like Webflow, Contentful, Wordpress, and other enterprise systems.

It’s also translated into results for their clients. While working with the Chicago History Museum, Clique’s work resulted in a 29% increase in returning visitors for the museum, 7% increase in mobile users, and a 103% increase in traffic on their primary revenue-generating page.

Clique’s work centers on two questions:

1. How can we make something interesting?
2. How can we build something that goes beyond checking boxes — something that feels distinct, exciting, and capable of provoking a genuine human response?

Although, thanks to artificial intelligence, Clique is seeing a trend in the industry where answers to these questions are converging on a single path. “Everyone's reading the same manual,” Novak said. “Pretty soon, that's going to dry up.”

As early as twenty years ago, as Nelson recalled, the process focused on taking different directions, and designing products that are interesting, unique, and human-centric. But today, in the age of AI, organizations are rushing to commoditize themselves, which results in work that feels repetitive, dry, and emotionally flat.

“There are a lot of organizations out there that are sort of accidentally plodding toward a really uninteresting, uninspired future,” Nelson said.

But for Clique Studios, the future still requires creative solutions to the extent where they can “be ahead of the curve on what’s going to captivate people’s interest and connect with them,” Novak said.

To support this, Clique offers all employees the Clique Creative Grant, a yearly stipend that invests in their “full creative self,” including everything from education to inspiration (including museums and performances).

When Novak and Nelson searched for a physical workspace after returning from Covid, TeamWorking by TechNexus was the first place they called.

Clique’s team had previously been involved in the community at TeamWorking, where the co-founders found themselves in environments with people who are just “building,” Nelson said.

“When you're walking in the halls, it's a mix of startups and multimillion-dollar companies,” Novak said. “And you can't tell the difference between the people as you're interacting with them.”

At TeamWorking, the co-founders found what Novak summed up in one word: “energy” – the same type that brought them together twenty years ago, and the kind that will carry Clique Studios forward as it grows in an industry that will never stop changing.

By Alex Chen at TechNexus Venture Collaborative