Work and seat map: every company on one map, by the seat the group held

What it is

In August and September 2026 the Common Ground site was rebuilt under art direction that Khounlavong set. Strategy sessions in September changed what the site had to say. It had to answer one question, "Have you done this before?", and put proof ahead of backstory.

The old portfolio was a grid of cards with filters. His own words on it are in the site plan of September 23, 2026: "It's just a wall of stuff. People can filter through it, but no one does." The rebuild shows the work as a map. Each company is a point, tied to every seat the group held there: brand, operations and advisory, finance, technology, and legal.

The staging build is titled "Common Ground | One Method. Two Pillars". It is blocked from search engines. The live site has not been changed.

What Khounlavong did

• Set the art direction for the rebuild on August 27, 2026, and locked one brand accent, a burnt orange, chosen because it belongs to no principal.
• Set two rules for the body of work: never invent a metric, and his work and Jesse Fowler's must read at equal weight.
• Chose four featured works, Lïef Midtown, Alice, APEXX AI and Fluidmapper, and cut six others with the reasons recorded.
• Rejected an early interactive mock on September 14, 2026 because it asked the visitor about themselves and showed no proof.
• Rejected the September 17, 2026 build as too basic, named three reference sites, and had a written study made against them.
• Gave the seat taxonomy on September 18, 2026, company by company, across five seats. The map began with 28 companies: the 27 on the live site plus Robby Prochnow's firm.
• Had a new site plan drawn up on September 23, 2026, after a scan of competitors. The finding: totals that a firm reports about itself are the default in the category, and named clients and working software are the difference.
• Decided on September 28, 2026 that the map keeps seats as its only filter, and that the portfolio tiles are rewritten from wiki text only after the team settles the facts.
• Ruled on three facts on the preview on September 29, 2026: Lip Loi Creative since December 2019, the approved Oakley wording for 2023, and Lïef Midtown as a 1971 office building.
• Decided the rebuilt site does not go live until the rest of the site is worked through.

Results

• A staging site with a map of 33 companies and a written launch checklist.
• On the preview, 21 of the 33 companies carry a record from the wiki, and 36 of the 44 wiki case studies are linked. Filter counts are counted from the map itself.
• A review found 14 points where the site and the wiki disagree. A workbook was built for the team so the facts can be settled. Nothing was changed on either.
• Not launched. No result numbers exist.

At a glance