Partnership and Growth: How Macktez and 2x4 Built a 30-Year Relationship

It began with a conversation.

The relationship between Macktez and 2x4 did not begin with a contract. It began with a conversation.

In the mid-1990s, Michael Rock was a faculty member in Yale's Graphic Design department, where he agreed to be an independent study adviser to an undergrad named Noah Landow on a project about interactive computer technology in education. (Delivered on a Syquest cartridge and a box of cards in a salvaged card catalog drawer.)

In 1994 2x4 was formed when Michael, Susan Sellers, and Georgie Stout created a new studio.

After moving to New York City, Noah freelanced as a designer and provided support for 2x4, and other studios. By 1996 these varied efforts had coalesced into Macktez, which Noah founded with Michael Horst as a loose collective of technical designers and design-savvy technologists.

Reacting

“Something broke, can you give us a hand?”

In its early years, 2x4 was a studio that operated like many creative firms: it hired extraordinary talent, kept overhead low, and treated technology as a necessary cost rather than a strategic investment. The studio would buy one new computer every six to twelve months instead of refreshing the whole fleet, which meant most machines were five or six years old; extremely old for that era. When something broke, Noah would come in and fix it. When a hard drive filled up, Noah would figure out how to free up more space. The approach was, in his own words, “How do we jury-rig this stuff? How can we find a cost-effective way to solve this problem quickly and creatively?”

It was the right model for the studio's size and stage. 2x4 was doing high-profile work, including identity systems for Prada, a competition entry with Rem Koolhaas for MoMA, a massive Woodstock revival project that involved thousands of full-bleed photographs and files literally too large to print. Macktez's job was to keep those projects moving. Sometimes that meant defragmenting a hard drive. Sometimes it meant calling a DSL provider three times in a week because service was unreliable. Sometimes it meant running Norton Utilities on a machine that should have been replaced two years ago and finding enough headroom to finish a deadline.

By 2000, the relationship had grown enough that Macktez was managing a full studio relocation for 2x4, coordinating cabling contractors, supervising the installation of servers and network hardware, running an eight-hour appointment with Bell Atlantic to bring up DSL in the new space, and handling every vendor call in between. That year, Macktez logged 150 hours working on 2x4 projects. Four years later, the number was 700 hours. In 2007 it was 1,100 hours. In 2008, the year Macktez was most deeply embedded in the operational life of the studio, it peaked at 1,300 hours.

The work of those early years shows up vividly in the records. Noah and a rotating team of Macktez technicians — Matthew Vladimir, Dallas Roberts, Jordan Kilpatrick, Matthew Gray, Joseph Aulisi — were fielding daily requests from studio staff, managing DAT tape backups, troubleshooting workstations, ordering supplies, handling email hosting, tracking software licenses, and visiting on-site multiple times a week. 2x4's day-to-day technology contact was Irwin Chen, who communicated constantly with Noah about server space, DSL outages, and new equipment needs. Server disk space was already a recurring concern as early as October 2000, when a technician's note recorded “constant issues with disk space” and recommended adding SCSI storage to the RAID set. That note, written 25 years ago, reads like a preview of everything that came after.

2x4 maintained deep academic connections throughout this era to RISD, to Yale, and to design and architecture schools across the country. The studio had the feel of what Noah calls “a dynamic post-graduate program.” Junior designers would arrive for two or three years and then leave to start their own studios. The work was consistently ambitious, and Macktez was close enough to the work to understand it. For the Prada identity system, Macktez helped the design team build Microsoft Word and Excel templates that translated 2x4's graphic language into tools Prada's own staff could use. For the Dallas Fort Worth competition with architect Richard Gluckman, Noah participated directly as a designer, not just as IT support. The line between technology partner and studio collaborator was never entirely fixed.

Starting in 2008, the dynamic shifted with a clearer emphasis from 2x4 on containing technology costs.

An internal report drafted by Macktez in 2010 captured the change in engagement and strategy. “The requirement to maintain a bare minimum number of hours per week,” it reads, “has meant a focus on only core maintenance and reacting to emergencies.” Long-term planning had come “to a stop.” Macktez had been “excluded from internal technology planning discussions.” Management had made a deliberate decision to reduce Macktez's role to the minimum necessary to keep things running. Macktez honored it. They kept the servers up, managed the backups, responded to emergencies, and waited.

By 2013, Noah and his colleague Jay Ivan wrote a candid technology report addressed to Michael Rock and 2x4's CFO Doug Freedman. Carefully and professionally, it addressed the risks of continuing to defer technology investment. The studio had been getting by on aging infrastructure for years, limiting its ability to take advantage of advancements in hardware and software; designers had “grown more resourceful in handling tech support needs” that competed with their project work; and the storage situation had reached a genuine limit. The studio's file exchange server was a Mac mini handling more work than it was designed for. The active projects Drobo was more than 80% full and filling up fast. The FileMaker server was running on a PowerMac G5 that was years past its useful life.

The period of constraint was necessary from 2x4's business perspective, but deferred costs had created urgent technology challenges. The 2013 report was an invitation to rebuild.

Managing

“Let's not wait for things to break.”

After Covid restrictions eased, work slowly returned to the office. Macktez reorganized its management tools and workflows to prioritize remote-first support, which was very different from the regular in-person support visits that consultants and technicians had made to 2x4 for years. But the work that had started in 2013 to maximize stability at 2x4 made that transition easier. Years of documented, consistent work had built the trust, knowledge, and institutional understanding needed to build the next era of engagement.

In the summer of 2023, Macktez proposed, and 2x4 approved, a comprehensive rebuild of the studio's physical network infrastructure. Before any equipment was ordered, Macktez conducted an Ethernet tracing audit: two technicians, Ray Brown and Jairo Cuenca, tested and certified all 168 Ethernet cable runs throughout the office, created annotated floor plans, and documented every pass and fail. The audit was not billable work in the traditional sense. It was due diligence; knowing exactly what existed before deciding what to replace.

From there, the projects ran in sequence. The wireless network came first: seven Juniper Mist enterprise access points, each connected by new Cat6A cabling capable of supporting multigigabit speeds, deployed across the office with pre- and post-installation wireless coverage surveys to verify performance. The Juniper Mist platform manages the access points from the cloud and provides AI-driven analytics for diagnosing issues before users notice them. Macktez CTO Reilly Scull and network engineer Luis Rodriguez designed the solution; the installation team verified every square foot of coverage before signing off.

The network upgrade followed. That project — new equipment, full configuration, on-site installation, comprehensive testing, and complete documentation — closed out in November 2023 with a formal handoff including rack diagrams, network diagrams, and configuration records. The documentation is not incidental. It is part of the deliverable. 2x4 now owns a complete picture of their own infrastructure.

Macktez spent months researching and designing a new file sharing solution. In Covid's wake, Macktez had migrated dozens of clients' on-prem server storage to the cloud, and initially planned to recommend a similar solution to 2x4. But the amount of data to migrate and the folder depth of the storage made 2x4's needs more complex. In the end, a hybrid Synology/Dropbox system was designed. On prem storage was consolidated into a single Synology RS4021xs+ server, the studio's Dropbox environment was cleaned up and prepped for more regular, secure use, and a migration tool, Movebot transferred data without disrupting active workflows.

In November 2025, Macktez launched its Essentials managed services platform at 2x4. Essentials uses JumpCloud to create a centralized identity directory: every staff member has a single password that works across Google Workspace, Dropbox, the VPN, the file server, and their computer login. Multi-factor authentication, enforced through the JumpCloud Protect app, is required for all users for all federated services. Every device in the studio is enrolled in endpoint management: antivirus, drive encryption, screen lock policy, and remote wipe capability if a machine is lost or stolen. Onboarding and offboarding workflows are now systematic: when a new employee joins 2x4, access is provisioned from a single platform. When someone leaves, it is revoked from the same place.

The addition of JumpCloud MSP tools at 2x4 marked a milestone for 2x4 and Macktez. It's a recognition that remote-first technology support is more efficient, effective, and secure than the weekly in-person visits that characterized the first 25 years of this relationship. These tools also create more opportunities for iterative policy changes in the coming years, as technology itself is changing at as great a pace as ever.