A pretty portfolio is NOT what makes someone a good freelancer I’ve hired freelancers who looked insane online, the interview was great, we vibed Then I put them on a project: - everything is late - feedback barely gets addressed - I can tell they rushed it

Research is the most important part of design I can't stress it enough Recently a client came to us for an "outsider perspective" We spent 3 days just researching their industry The competitors, the way they approach customers, their designs, websites, marketing... We didn't

I run my whole studio in Notion now and I finally found an AI feature that’s not a gimmick Notion AI has a beta Agents thing where they can run on a schedule and do specific jobs for you Last week I made one called Content Strategist Twice a week it: - scans what I worked on -

Hiring is the hardest part of running a studio Not because good designers don’t exist Because the good ones are expensive And if you don’t have money, you end up hunting in that cheaper tier, trying to find people with *potential* who actually care about the craft Way harder

This UI from 2010 is still on the Apple site

Throw back to 3 years ago when I reimagined Figma in Apple Vision Pro

Research is everything For our client projects we spend the first days just researching - how the industry works - the competition - copy patterns Before we dive into a project we always wanna understand the space the best we can Clients value that more than you'd think

Most studios can make a pretty design Very few can go beyond that This week we landed a client for a reason that had nothing to do with visuals They needed an integration with a super niche 3rd party API They’d already reached out to few studios and heard the same thing from

tired of copy-pasting the same context into every ai tool? yeah, me too. introducing OneContext connect your data once (twitter, github, notion, whatever). it auto-syncs daily and works everywhere via MCP. ✅ set up once, use in claude, cursor, chatgpt ✅ auto-updates so your

Lets be honest You don't need to switch to anything All the platforms are fine... Just listen to your music...

3 stupid mistakes cost me at least $50K in the first year of running my design studio Here's what I'd do differently if I could go back: 1. Raised prices earlier I charged freelance rates for studio work Big mistake - I was delivering way more value but pricing like I was

Ever seen a better looking video editor?

Does anyone have better icons than Microsoft?

Most teams can either design or build Very few can do both well Last week a client came to us after others said a very specific API integration can't be done We walked them through our solution on a call Now we have them on a monthly retainer