Good design principles are easier to list than to apply — and most lists get it wrong. We've spent twenty years testing what actually holds under pressure: across 81 logos, 128 projects, and judging rooms where good design either survives scrutiny or quietly doesn't. What makes design work isn't a checklist. It's a set of decisions that age well, communicate without effort, and resist the urge to explain themselves.

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.

Team to team design is how we've always worked — not because it sounds progressive, but because the other way produces worse outcomes. When your strategist sits across from ours, decisions happen in minutes instead of weeks. That direct team to team design dynamic is what most studios promise and few actually practice.

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.

Should designers code? We've been asking ourselves that question since 2004 — across identities, interfaces, and campaigns where design met production head-on. The answer depends entirely on what kind of designer you want to be, and what kind of work you want to make. Should designers code is the wrong binary; the real question is how much of the medium should you understand before you hand it off.

Žakelj priimek ni le podpis — je surovina. Ko nosi ime tisti, ki oblikuje, se vprašanje avtorstva zaplete na zanimiv način. Ta projekt smo naredili, ker smo morali: ker je priimek Žakelj dovolj bogat, da postane samostojna oblikovalska izjava.

Good design and good clients arrive together — one rarely exists without the other. After two decades and 128 projects in Ljubljana, we've stopped pretending otherwise. The work only reaches its potential when the relationship is built on honesty, mutual respect, and a shared willingness to sit with the hard decisions.

Hell yes creative approach is how we decide what to make — and what to walk away from. If a project doesn't produce that immediate, visceral pull, we don't take it. That filter, applied consistently since 2004, is the reason our work holds together as a body rather than a portfolio of compromises.