Side projects

Designer side projects are not a break from real work — they are the reason the real work stays sharp. We have run a design studio in Ljubljana since 2004, and the projects that never had a client are often the ones that taught us the most. Side projects are where instinct gets to move faster than process.

November 3, 20232 Minutes

Our work is not easy. You need to stay excited all the time, and that is impossible. You need to find something that drives you—things that blow out some steam.

Side projects often play an important role in learning and growing my design skills; they allow me to explore new ideas or play around with old, unused ones.

Even when the times are not so great, you can’t be at your best all the time. You can’t start embracing that. We all have ups and downs; we all feel productive one day and coffee addict the next. Creativity is strange, and it is impossible to know when the idea will hit you.

Side projects make me happy and excited, even when I am completely stuck. I can easily shift to a side project and get my energy back.

It does not matter if you are working on new ideas or recycling some old ones that got stuck, just to prove you can do them. So go over your old notebook (yes, you need to have one) and start producing something. It is not important if something will grow out of it. Important is to finish it and ignore the money aspect.



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Redesign


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Corporate enthusiasm, by some unspoken rule, is supposed to stay hidden — filed away behind neutral tones and careful hedging. We've never understood that. Twenty years of design work, 80+ awards, and 128 projects later, we're still the studio that treats genuine excitement as a feature, not a liability. The corporate enthusiasm unspoken rule isn't just a cultural quirk — it's a design problem, and we treat it as one.

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First You Learn Than You Earn


Designer learning process isn't a phase — it's the foundation everything else is built on. We spent years in Ljubljana studios understanding materials, systems, and failure before a single award or client brief justified the time. The designer learning process, done honestly, is what separates work that holds from work that merely sells.

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