Team 2 team
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.
Business design is shifting from human 2 human to team 2 team; this is becoming more and more important; team spirit produces more results than any individual effort. B2B<H2H<T2T.
As you know, the good old b2b is becoming a really old expression and was replaced with human 2 human in the past few years, and that was a beautiful change. But the reality is that we are all working as teams.
We (the client team + our team) will create something great, which is a good mantra to start anything. Using the plural to describe a team is an important shift in communication and is closer to how we do things—embracing the T2T. We all have teams, even small ones, even if not all of them sit in the same room—it is a team, and everything is a team effort. One person can’t know it all, and we can’t do it all on our own.
Even the results of team effort are much greater than anything else (check every team sport out there, check their spirit, check how they celebrate, how they help each other, admire how they lose, and get up again).
Discussing all aspects with the client is a team-binding relationship with a really good learning curve. Listening to each other is the correct spirit because individual approaches only build the ego we don’t want. Pushing something without all the aspects a discussion can give you leads to poor decisions.
But there is a catch. The team cannot work only on online meetings; you must have focused live meetings with the whole team. I know it is impossible to improve things over calls, chat, Zoom, etc. We all need to be there, we need to feel the people we work with, and we all need to be focused.
What Team to Team Design Removes from the Process
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There Is Only One Right Way to Publicly Commission Design
Public design commissioning is not a matter of preference — there is a right way and everything else. We've worked through enough flawed briefs, misaligned procurement structures, and well-meaning but broken processes to know exactly where the public commissioning of design goes wrong, and what it looks like when it doesn't.
Ethics
Design ethics and sustainability aren't a policy we wrote to hang on a wall — they're the criteria we use before we say yes to a project. We've been running this studio since 2004, and the framework hasn't changed: if the work can't be defended on ethical grounds, it doesn't leave the desk. Design ethics and sustainability, in practice, means turning things down as often as taking them on.
The Worst Kind of Project
Unrealized design projects are, without question, the worst thing that happens to a studio. Not the difficult client. Not the impossible brief. The work you believed in completely — refined, presented, defended — that simply never saw the light. We've built 81 logos and collected over 80 awards, and still, it's the unrealized design projects that occupy the most space in the room.
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.
How to Be a Real Designer
How to be a real designer isn't about software or style — it's about who holds the argument when the client wants something easier. We've been in that room for twenty years. Being a real designer means resisting the comfortable solution, even when no one asks you to.
What Does a Branding Agency Actually Do?
What does a branding agency do — and what separates the ones worth hiring from the ones who just make things look nice? We've been answering that question through work since 2004. What does a branding agency do at its best: it builds the strategic and visual foundation a business can actually stand on.
Why Branding and Web Design Must Be Aligned
Branding and web design alignment fails the moment two separate teams touch the same project without talking to each other. We've watched it happen — a considered identity system lands on a site that treats it like decoration. Branding and web design alignment means the strategy that shapes the mark also shapes the architecture, the copy rhythm, the interaction logic.
How to Create Logos That Last
Logos that last are rarely accidents. After 81 identities built over twenty years, we've learned to distrust trend and trust structure — the marks that endure are the ones stripped of everything circumstantial. What makes a logo that lasts isn't mystery; it's discipline applied at every decision point.