Excited?
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.
If you are the only one who is excited, you are probably working for the damn wrong people!
I admit. In the past ten years, the whole nature of my work has changed from an agency design studio to a branding design studio. It was not easy. Shifting the perspective changed the nature of my work and the process behind it, but I feel this is where I can help the most. Helping smaller clients build their brands with strong visual language is something I love to explore. My role as a design director for agile new brands (still avoiding startups) is living proof of how important it is to kick off a brand with a strong visual language.
They have a story, they are excited, they are thankful, they are hard-working individuals, they care, they work more than I do, and they have a future. They get me excited to the point where I don’t sleep.
It is a roller coaster, but that’s what I am here for. Because of that, it helps to follow some simple rules in the studio. They work and it took me years to master them 😉
Never kill a client.
Never get drunk with a client.
Take everything personally.
Get shit done.
Get excited.
Why Excited Client Energy Shapes Every Branding Decision
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Logo Design vs Brand Identity: What’s the Difference?
Logo design vs brand identity — we get asked to explain the difference on almost every first client call. A logo is a mark. A brand identity is the entire system that gives that mark meaning across every surface it touches. We've spent twenty years building both, and the gap between them is where most projects either hold together or fall apart.
The Why
Brand why statement is the first question we ask — before color, form, or name. Not because it's fashionable to talk about purpose, but because a brand built without a clear why collapses under its own aesthetic eventually. We've seen it. Defining your brand why statement early is the structural decision that holds everything else together.
The Gap
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.
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.
If You Were Ever a Developer, This Is Your Time to Return
Developers returning to coding right now are walking into something different than what they left. The tools got faster, the frameworks multiplied, and somewhere in that churn the advantage quietly moved — away from raw output, toward judgment. If you built things before and stopped, developers returning to coding after a break carry something the continuous practitioners often don't: distance, and the clarity that comes with it.
Vibe coding
Vibe coding design is not a shortcut — it's a discipline we've been practising long before anyone named it. We let visual instinct drive technical decisions, the same way we've approached every identity and interface since 2004. When feel and function collapse into a single gesture, that's vibe coding design working as it should.
Every Comment Can Be Positive – How to Give Constructive Feedback to Designers
Constructive feedback for designers is one of the most underestimated skills in any creative collaboration. Get it wrong and you stall the work; get it right and the next version is better than anything you would have briefed. We've been on the receiving end of both kinds — and after 81 logos and 128 projects, we've learned to tell the difference.
Sometimes we all need a little push
Need a little push before you can finally commit to a branding project? We've heard that hesitation hundreds of times — and it rarely has anything to do with budget. After 20 years and 81 logos, we've learned that the thing holding most businesses back isn't readiness. It's the wrong idea of what readiness looks like. Sometimes all it takes is someone telling you: you're closer than you think.