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.
It has happened. There are no more mid-level designers. Only struggling juniors and a few seniors remain—nothing in between.
No place to learn anymore. New titles keep popping up—product designer, UX designer, design strategist. Fancy names. Empty promises. They don’t hide the problem; they highlight it. The truth? The designers who truly know their craft—those who survived decades of media evolution, from print to web, packaging to branding, identities to campaigns—are vanishing.
These are the people who spot problems before they exist. Who connect the dots nobody else sees. Those who solve issues before they explode…
The gap isn’t coming. It’s here.
Why Vanishing Middle Designers Define the Gap in Boutique Studios
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Gravity Grotesk, Gravity Serif typography 1.5
Gravity Grotesk is a neutral sans for my web. A lower x-height and tighter spacing give it a grotesk voice. Flat ledges where curves meet stems and angled terminals give it a character of its own. Gravity Serif shares its x-height, cap height, and line height, so the two mix on one line.
How to use AI without losing your soul
How to use AI without losing your soul is the wrong question only if you've already handed your thinking over. We haven't. After two decades of building identities from first principles, we treat AI the same way we treat every other tool that arrived promising to replace us — useful precisely where it stops pretending to think, and dangerous the moment we let it. How to use AI without losing your soul starts with knowing what your soul actually contributes.
To all the misfits who jumped to freelancing
Freelance designer struggles don't announce themselves. One month you're euphoric about escaping the agency; six months later you're chasing an invoice at midnight and questioning every career decision you've ever made. We've seen this arc enough times — from our studio in Ljubljana, across two decades of watching good designers disappear into bad freelance situations — to say something honest about it.
Remember when you learned to spot a stock photo?
You could see it from a mile away. The same thing is happening now. We are growing up developing an even sharper instinct for what feels generated, repeated, predictable, and empty.
We always see ourselves a little better before we look in the mirror.
Brand self-perception distorts before the brief even lands on our desk. We've watched it happen across 81 logo projects — a company convinced their identity reads confident, while their audience registers something closer to anxious. The mirror test isn't vanity; it's the first honest step in any serious brand identity work.
The Currency of Respect
Respect as currency is not a metaphor we use lightly — it is the actual unit of exchange in every client relationship we have built since 2004. We have watched projects collapse not over budget or concept, but over the slow withdrawal of basic professional respect. When respect as currency depreciates, no invoice or award recovers the loss.
In the corporate world, there’s this unspoken rule that enthusiasm should be hidden
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.