Designers work for free more often than the industry admits — and we've done it ourselves, deliberately, with criteria. The question isn't whether it devalues your work. The question is whether you set the terms or someone else did. We've spent two decades deciding which projects earn our time without a brief, a budget, or a contract.

Discipline vs talent in design is a question we stopped debating around our tenth year of practice. Not because talent is irrelevant — it isn't — but because discipline is the only thing that shows up on deadline, survives a difficult client, and compounds across twenty years of work. We've built 81 logos and earned over 80 awards on that premise, and the evidence keeps arriving.

Excited clients are not a bonus — they're a design material. We've watched the same brief produce two completely different outcomes depending on whether the client came in energised or resigned. Excited client energy doesn't just make meetings easier; it changes what branding becomes possible.

Designer success metrics are rarely what the industry tells you they are. We've delivered 128 projects across two decades, and the measure that holds is deceptively simple: the work is out in the world, the payment landed, and the client is doing your marketing for you. Those three moments, in sequence, define whether a project actually succeeded.

Things I am still learning are simple reflections of the realities of my work: craft over trends, judgment over imitation, substance over appearance, and good work over easy wins.

Vanishing middle designers are the most interesting people in any studio — and the first ones the industry stops talking about. The gap between junior promise and senior authority isn't new, but it's getting harder to cross, and we've been watching it happen up close for twenty years. What follows is what that looks like from where we sit.

Made with AI design is the new "Made in China" — and we mean that as a warning, not a trend report. We've spent twenty years watching what happens when cost becomes the only design criterion. The results are always the same: disposable work, eroded brand identity, and a market that eventually has to pay twice.

Art is provocation — and that alone makes it fundamentally different from design. Where design resolves, art destabilises. We've spent two decades navigating that tension, and art is provocation precisely because it refuses the comfort of conclusions.