Process

How we work

Design projects rarely fail on the design. They fail on the machinery around it — the date that slid, the week nobody can account for, the decision made in a meeting that nobody wrote down, the revision that turned into an invoice.

If you've hired a studio before, you know these. Here they are, and here's what we did about each one.

“The timeline was four weeks. It took nine.”

The problem

Most quotes are a hopeful number. The studio wants the work, the date sounds achievable in the room, and nobody has checked it against what they've already sold.

The slip doesn't announce itself. You find out in week five, when the thing you needed for a launch isn't coming.

What we do

Every program is built as a plan with named steps and real day counts on each one — design days, build days, and the days that belong to you. Before we quote you, that plan is laid against what's already booked on our calendar.

If it doesn't fit, you get a later start date instead of a fictional finish date. Your deposit holds a specific slot, not a place in a vague queue.

“I had to chase them for a status update.”

The problem

You email to ask how it's going. That question costs you a small amount of dignity every time you ask it, and the answer is usually “going well!” — which tells you nothing.

The alternative is worse: a portal with a login you'll forget, a dashboard your team won't open, a board you're expected to interpret.

What we do

You get one link in your first email, and it's in the footer of every email after. Bookmark it. It always shows four things: what week you're on, whose turn it is, every decision you've made, and every piece of work you've been sent.

No account, no password, nothing for your team to learn. You never have to ask how it's going.

“Every vendor wants a new Slack — and the ones that don't get buried in my inbox.”

The problem

Each new project arrives with its own channel: a Slack Connect invite, a workspace you get added to, a Notion your team never opens. Three vendors in, the context for your brand is spread across three places you don't own and can't search together.

The projects that don't do that are worse. The whole engagement lives in an email thread that forks the moment someone hits reply-all, and by week four the answer to “what did we agree about the pricing section?” is somewhere in sixty messages nobody will re-read.

What we do

No new workspace, ever. Everything comes to the inbox you already have, and every email carries a link back to the one page that holds the project.

That page is the durable copy: the plan, the current state, every piece of work you've been sent, and every decision that's been made — still there in month six, when the thread is long gone. Email is how we reach you. The page is where the project lives, and it's one URL you can forward to anyone.

“A month disappeared and nobody could say where.”

The problem

Work stalls in the polite middle. They think they're waiting on your feedback, you think you're waiting on the next round, and two weeks evaporate before someone finally asks.

At the end, everyone has a different story about who held things up, and none of them are checkable.

What we do

The project moves in turns, and one side always visibly has the ball. When it lands with you, the email says what you're looking at, what we need, where to leave it, and how long it should take. When it's with us, your page says so — and says when you'll hear next.

If you go quiet, you get a light nudge on day two, a warmer one later, and a real note from Julie if it runs long. No “overdue” banners, no guilt. If we go quiet, the same page says that, in the same plain language.

“I wanted to be helpful. Nobody told me how.”

The problem

This one rarely gets said out loud, because it sounds like the client's fault. It isn't. You're handed work and a blank comment box, with no sense of what stage this is, what's still movable, or what kind of response actually helps.

So you do the reasonable thing and mention the font size — and three weeks later everyone's frustrated, because what was needed at that moment was “yes, that's the right argument for our product,” not a note about type.

The other half of it: nobody tells you how much of the project depends on you until you're already late. You'd have cleared the calendar if you'd known.

What we do

Every handoff comes with a short briefing — what you're looking at, what decision we need, what kind of feedback is useful right now, what to ignore for the moment because it's still moving, and roughly how long it should take you. At concept stage that's “react to the argument, not the execution.” At sign-off it's the opposite: this is the moment for the detail.

Responses are structured, not a blank box. Where the moment calls for a choice — which of these three, yes or not yet — you get that choice plus room for a note. Easier to answer honestly, and much harder for us to misread.

And you'll know the shape of your own commitment before you sign: the plan shows which days are ours and which are yours. There are three review moments, not eleven.

“They gave me one day to review, then took three weeks themselves.”

The problem

Review windows are where timelines get quietly rewritten. You get squeezed — approve by tomorrow or we slip — while the studio absorbs its own delays invisibly, by compressing the design work at the end.

The work gets worse and nobody says so out loud.

What we do

Every review gate gives you two full working days. That time is yours; use it.

Need four? That's allowed — and your delivery date moves out by two days, visibly, on your own page. We'd rather show you the real math than protect a date by cutting corners on the thing you're paying for. It runs both directions: our slips move the same date, on the same page.

Worth knowing up front — on a typical project, close to half the calendar is client-side. A responsive client genuinely finishes early.

“Then came the invoice for ‘out of scope.’”

The problem

“Revisions” is the vaguest word in this industry. Nobody counts them out loud, so either you feel like you're spending goodwill every time you ask for a change, or a bill shows up at the end for work you didn't know you were authorizing.

Both versions poison the last week of a project.

What we do

Each program states exactly how many concepts you get, how many refinement passes are scoped work, and how many revision rounds are included — and the system counts them, so you can always see where you stand.

When a request falls outside what we agreed, we say so immediately, in writing, with the price of adding it. You get a real choice while it's still cheap. There is no scenario where you learn about extra cost after the work is already done.

“The CEO showed up in week five with a completely different opinion.”

The problem

One person briefs the project. Everyone else in the company sees the work for the first time when it's nearly finished — and one of them has strong feelings nobody surfaced.

Now you're relitigating direction with three weeks left, and it's expensive.

What we do

Your stakeholders each get their own link and contribute on their own time — from their phone, if that's the fifteen minutes they have. Then you get a short read-back: here's where your team agrees strongly, here's where you're split.

Finding out before kickoff that half your team wants “premium” and half wants “approachable” is enormously valuable. Finding out at round two is what kills timelines.

“We decided that on a call — but nobody wrote it down, and now we're arguing about it again.”

The problem

Decisions get made in meetings. They live in someone's memory, someone else's notes, and a message that scrolled away.

Then a new stakeholder joins in week three — a new head of marketing, a board member, the founder finally paying attention — and asks a question that was settled two weeks ago. Nobody can point to where it was settled, so it gets re-opened. That's not one lost meeting; it's a re-run of the debate, plus rework, plus the quiet erosion of everyone's confidence that this project is under control.

What we do

Decisions are recorded as they happen, on the page, in order — what was decided, who decided it, on what date, attached to the exact version of the work you were looking at when you decided it. Not a summary written from memory at the end. A running record you can open mid-project.

When a decision carries a real trade-off, the record says so in writing: what we recommended, what we flagged as a risk, and — if you went a different way — that you were told and chose anyway. Not to build a case against you, but so that in month five, “why is it like this?” has an answer that doesn't depend on anyone's memory.

And when a new person joins, you forward them one link. They can read what's been decided and why in ten minutes, on their own, without a catch-up meeting and without you re-arguing settled ground.

“I got a Figma link and had no idea what I was looking at.”

The problem

Designers live in Figma. Clients don't, and there's no reason they should. You open the link and get artboards, comments, layers, six versions of the same screen, and someone's exploration from last Tuesday sitting next to the thing you're supposed to approve.

You can't tell what's finished from what's abandoned, and the tool gives you no way to know what's being asked of you. So you say something vague, or nothing, and the project drifts a little further from what you meant. Sending a zip or twelve attachments is the same failure with fewer features.

What we do

Figma stays on our side of the wall. It's a workspace, not a reading surface.

What comes to you is a page built for the work: only the pieces meant for you, at full size, with a short written argument for each, sometimes a 60-second walkthrough from Julie explaining what changed and why, and a clear way to respond. It reads on a phone in a coffee line, which is often the ten honest minutes you actually have.

Every version is kept, including the directions you didn't choose. If month four brings a change of heart, the road not taken is still there.

“Six months later, nobody remembered why.”

The problem

The files outlive the reasoning. A new hire asks why the logo is that way. Your board asks what you actually bought.

The person who could answer has moved on, and the answer lived in a thread that got archived.

What we do

On delivery day you get the full asset package and a printable document with every decision made during the project — what you were shown, what you chose, when, and why. In order, with dates and thumbnails. It's the running record from mid-project, closed out and handed over.

This is the part clients tell us they didn't know to ask for. It's also the reason they refer us.

“The project never really ended.”

The problem

The last ten percent dribbles out over a month. Files trickle in, a few things stay “almost done,” emails get slower, and eventually you stop asking.

You never got a clean finish, and you're not sure whether you're allowed to ask for one.

What we do

Projects end on a date, with a handoff: the full package, the decision record, and a short conversation about what's next — extend, maintain, or nothing at all.

A real ending, on the calendar.

Why this beats the alternatives

A bigger agency

They sell you the senior person and staff you with a junior. Here you meet the person who does the work, and that person designs it — and often builds it. We take a couple of engagements at a time, deliberately, and we can show you the capacity math instead of just promising attention.

A solo freelancer

Talent without any of the above: no enforced turns, no counted revisions, no live status, no written record of what was decided. That's precisely what goes missing when you hire one good person, and it's exactly what we built.

The portal studios

They solve their problem, not yours — you end up with another login, another dashboard, another thing to teach your team. Nothing here asks you to learn software. It's email and clean pages; the machinery stays on our side of the wall.

And the uncomfortable one

The same system that holds us to our dates keeps an honest record of yours. That sounds unnerving until you've lived through a project where a month vanished and nobody could say where it went. A fixed date only means something when both sides can see the truth in real time.

Let's make something people love.

Tell us what you're building. We take on a couple of projects at a time.

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