When I think back over the past year, and especially looking forward to 2010, one voice echoes in my head, that of Roy Schneider in Jaws: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

But what a difference a year makes. Last year at this time, the Kicker Studio “space” (and that’s being generous with the term), consisted of three small cubicles and some borrowed desks and chairs. Our 2008 holiday party was attended by less than a dozen people. Jennifer hadn’t moved to San Francisco from New York yet, and we had one client that we’d gotten via our friends at Stimulant. (It was a great project though!)

Flash-forward a year and we have a growing set of clients; some amazing projects completed or in progress including Mag+ and the SVA installation and others we can’t talk about; and a product that’s launched (with more pieces coming soon): yolink. We’ve started working with Emily Moyer, a great industrial designer, and the Kicker Conference Phone was our first collaboration. And our Italian intern for the fall, Federico Zannier, is hard at work on Kickerbot, which we hope will be available to play with soon.

We’ve also grown in some dull but essential ways. In August, we moved into a new space that can accommodate our (slowly) growing staff. We hired a design coordinator, Jana Carrey, who has whipped our office space into shape. We have (gasp!) health insurance now, and infrastructure like wireless networks and bottled water to maintain. We’re also hard at work on a new version of this site, which will launch in January.

For a company of our age and size, we’ve been pleased with how well we’ve been received. We showed off the Kicker Conference Phone at Fast Company’s Masters of Design event in October. We’ve been mentioned in Barclays, Core77, Crunchgear, BoingBoing Gadgets, Wired, Fast Company, Slashgear, Creativity, and The Guardian. Not too shabby.

And we’re really just getting warmed up. I can’t wait to see what next year brings.

Oh, and if this all sounds exciting, and you have a project you’d like us to work on in 2010, contact us. Or if you’re interested in joining our team, send us a cover letter, resume, and portfolio to jobs at kickerstudio dot com. We’d love to hear from you.