our story
OUR STORY • A PRACTICE BUILT AROUND UNDERSTANDING
A name that became a method.
Argot Nots began as a collaboration between educators and artists who resisted the mystification surrounding creative work. Nearly a decade later, that original pursuit of understanding has become a way of helping knowledge-rich organizations navigate complexity and change.
THE ORIGIN • 2017
A refusal of jargon and an invitation to understanding.
In 2017, two optimistic educators working side by side at the Kansas City Art Institute asked what might happen if they combined their creative practices. Art and design were too often surrounded by mystification and confusing artspeak. Their answer was a collective in pursuit of understanding.
The name turned that mission into a small joke with serious intent. “Argot” means the specialized language of a group; Argot Nots, pronounced argonauts, became a name for people unwilling to let expertise become a barrier. The search was never for a golden fleece. It was for forms, language, and experiences that could help others enter the ideas.
During a year-long studio residency at Charlotte Street Foundation, the collaboration moved through video, multimedia installation, photography, and manifesto-like billboards carrying a simple invitation: let’s talk. Humor, language, story, and teaching were not side interests; they became the early structure of the practice.
ARGOT
Specialized language intelligible to insiders—and often opaque to everyone else.
/
A threshold: between expertise and audience, complexity and form, knowing and understanding.
NOTS
A playful refusal to let specialized knowledge become exclusion.
Specialized knowledge deserves forms other people can enter.
The practice changed because the questions deepened.
Each chapter added a different way of seeing the same underlying problem: how people enter, interpret, and act on complex ideas.
01 / Origin
Educators + artists
Teaching and art established a habit of inquiry, critique, making, and explaining—not merely styling.
02 / Experiment
Studio + residency
Video, installation, photography, language, and public work made conversation itself part of the practice.
03 / Practice
Organization + systems
Work across higher education, nonprofits, and industry revealed how brands and websites carry organizational assumptions.
04 / Method
Research + consultancy
Doctoral inquiry gave sharper tools for information, metaphor, interface, and sensemaking under conditions of change.
HOW THE PRACTICE WORKS TODAY
Principal-led. Collaborative by design.
Argot Nots is led by co-founder and principal Logan Hamilton Acton. Clients work directly with the person responsible for research, strategy, creative direction, and the coherence of the whole engagement.
Co-founded with Meghan Skevington—an educator, editor, and experience designer who now serves as an advisor—the practice was collaborative from the beginning. Empathy, optimism, and conversation remain part of its character.
When a project requires additional depth or production capacity, trusted specialists join around the work—not between the client and the thinking. Working with only a few clients at a time protects attention, continuity, and trust.
Principal Attention
Specialist Depth
Limited Clients
The original pursuit still guides the work.
The original pursuit still guides the work.
01
Understanding starts with listening.
The most useful answer usually appears after the organization, its people, and its context have been heard carefully.
02
Clarity should reveal—not erase—complexity.
Good sensemaking gives people a way into a difficult idea while preserving the distinctions that matter.
03
Form is a way of thinking.
Names, narratives, diagrams, identities, and interfaces do not merely decorate meaning; they actively structure it.
04
A good system teaches people how to continue.
The work should leave clients with shared language, usable tools, and confidence—not dependence.
WHERE THE STORY LEADS NOW
Complexity, made legible.
Argot Nots now works with established organizations built around knowledge, expertise, ideas, or mission—especially when growth, cultural change, public expectations, or digital complexity have made the organization harder to understand.
We help leaders clarify what matters, organize complex information and offerings, and translate that shared direction into positioning, identity, information systems, and digital experiences.
If your organization is difficult to explain, that may be exactly where our work begins.
Knowledge-rich organizations
doing consequential work.
Higher education + research
Nonprofits + foundations
Cultural institutions
Associations + professional services
B2B + technology organizations