The Long Way Around

What a decade of working every side of this industry taught me about design, business, and building something of your own.

I didn’t expect to touch every corner of graphic design in my career. Honestly, I thought I’d land at a prestigious studio out of school and stay there until I retired. That was the plan.

For a long time, I was embarrassed by how much I’d moved around. Design school, then in-house at a studio, then freelance, then marketing for an artist, then an agency, then back to a studio again. It looked scattered from the outside. And for a while, it felt that way from the inside too.

But somewhere along the way, the embarrassment started to lift: what I’d been thinking of as dissonant and a lack of direction was actually the education. Every environment I worked in showed me design from a different angle: as craft, as service, as business, as brand, as output. And slowly, all those angles started to make sense.

What I have now, after all of it, is clarity about design as a business. I now know about how to build, how to operate, and how to talk to clients, and when to walk away from them. I understand the difference between what’s actually profitable and what just feels productive. And maybe most importantly: what doesn’t align with how I want to design or run my studio, which turns out to be just as valuable as knowing what does.

This post is my attempt to map that loop. Not as a cautionary tale and not as a prescription (I know your path will look different), but as an honest accounting of what each stop taught me, what I wish I’d known earlier, and what I’d do differently if I were starting over today.

Chapter 1 — Design School: The Foundation and the Blind Spot

Design school gave me the thing that matters most and is hardest to teach: how to think. Not just how to make things look good, but how to make things that actually mean something. They taught me the ethos that good work that solves a real problem, communicates a specific idea, and earns its existence. That foundation has never left me. Everything I’ve built since runs on it.

I’m genuinely grateful for my education. Shoutout to all my fav professors.

What I couldn’t see at the time (and wouldn’t see for years) was how much was missing. Yes, the critique culture was rigorous, and the conceptual training was real. But the business of design? The industry itself? How studios actually operate, how clients actually behave, how money actually moves? None of it came up. Or if it did, it didn’t land, or maybe I wasn’t listening.

The tricky thing about a blind spot is that you don’t know it’s there. I didn’t leave school feeling underprepared. I left feeling ready. It wasn’t until I was standing in front of a real client, or trying to price a project, or navigating baby’s first scope creep that I started to understand what the classroom hadn’t covered.

Design school taught me how to make the work. Everything else I had to figure out by doing it wrong first.

Fig. 1 — The ridiculous amount of confidence I had in securing a design job after school…

Chapter 2 — In-House at a Studio: The Real World, Fast

The first thing that changed when I walked into a studio was the stakes. In school, every brief was hypothetical. It was a fictional client, a contained exercise, a grade at the end. Here, there was a real person on the other side of the work. A real business. Real money!! And real consequences if what I made didn’t actually work.

That shift woke something up in me. I stopped thinking about design as something I was performing and started thinking about it as something I was responsible for. I learned how to take direction from a creative director, how to function as part of a team rather than work in isolation, and how to have an actual conversation with a client. Not just read a brief like a project syllabus, but to understand and talk to the human behind it.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the pace.

I was the youngest person in that studio by a significant margin. Fresh out of school, a handful of internships to my name, surrounded by some of the most talented people I’d ever been near. I wanted desperately to keep up. But I was still so early that there was a lot I simply didn’t know how to do. And the last thing I wanted was to find out by making a mistake that cost the studio time or the client money. So I carried that anxiety quietly and pushed through it. Hey, you’re supposed to feel sick to your stomach every day at your job, right??

My therapist told me many times that this studio job didn’t seem like a good fit. I told myself that this was just how design worked: fast, high-pressure, with every idea needing to be innovative, award-worthy, and earth-shattering. I thought that was the standard. I thought I just needed to catch up.

I was let go from that studio after about a year and a half. And while it didn’t feel like it at the time, it was one of the best things that could have happened to me. I was already on the edge of burnout before I’d barely started. What I needed wasn’t to push harder; it was to find a different pace, and eventually, a different way of working altogether.

Chapter 3 — Freelance: The Accidental Business School

Freelance wasn’t a plan. When I was let go from the studio, it was the only thing I knew how to do on my own and still get paid for. So I started. And very quickly realized I had no idea what I was doing…at least not on the business side.

The design part I could handle. It was everything around it that humbled me fast.

How much should I charge for this? How do I even calculate an hourly rate? Do I need a contract? Which platform do I use for invoicing, for project management, for collecting payments? Do I need an LLC? Every new client brought a new set of questions I didn’t have answers to, and I was Googling my way through all of it in real time. I rebuilt the invoice template, presentation format, and final file handoff process from scratch every single time. I was constantly reinventing the wheel, and I didn’t yet know enough to know that was the problem.

What freelancing gave me, though, was something the studio couldn’t: direct access to the person behind the work. No creative director as a buffer and no team to absorb the conversation. Just me and a real human with a real need, trying to figure out together what they actually wanted. I loved that! I got good at it. Building that kind of relationship, understanding what someone needs beneath what they’re asking for, and delivering something that would actually hold up over time became the part of design I cared about most.

But love for the work doesn’t pay rent on its own. I was undercharging and knew it. I couldn’t fully address it because I didn’t yet have the systems or the confidence to charge differently. I was cobbling together a salary from too many clients, trading my calendar for stability I wasn’t actually getting. Eventually, the exhaustion outweighed the freedom, and I started looking for something more sustainable, even if it meant giving up the autonomy I’d gotten used to.

Chapter 4 — In-House for an Artist: Learning What Actually Lights You Up

This stop on the loop looked different from everything before it. This time, instead of being inside a corporation, I was inside a studio full of female artists. These were painters, printmakers, people who made things with their hands and needed someone who could translate that work into something that would actually reach people and sell. I signed myself up.

For the first time, I was learning the marketing side of design in a real way. I learned the cadence for teasing a collection, building anticipation, setting up a drop, and using social media as a deliberate asset rather than an afterthought. Each new collection became its own brand with its own mood, story, and visual language. It was a different kind of thinking than pure design work and it sharpened something in me.

I also got to watch a business owner up close. Firsthand, I experienced how she managed a team, stayed creatively engaged, and moved between making art and running a business. It was inspiring to see her stay profitable without losing what made the work worth doing.

But something else was happening underneath all of it that I didn’t fully name until later.

The scope was narrow. Whereas she got to start fresh with every collection—new themes, new media, new energy—I was largely recreating the same set of marketing materials on a loop with a different color palette. And I noticed that the moments I felt most alive were the ones that looked like what she was doing: starting from nothing, taking a raw idea and building it into a whole world.

That’s when I understood something important about myself: the part of design I love most isn’t production or promotion, it’s invention. I thrive in the world of brand strategy, brand identity, and the work of bringing something that doesn’t exist yet to life with a voice and visual logic. That clarity didn’t come from a career counselor or a personality quiz; it came from sitting inside someone else’s creative process long enough to recognize what I was missing.

Chapter 5 — The Agency: The Cost of Legitimacy

Moving from working in-house to becoming a senior designer at the agency felt like leveling up. There were bigger clients, more resources, and a real organizational structure around me. After the patchwork of freelancing and the intimacy of working for an artist, it felt like the professional world was finally taking me seriously. I wanted that validation, and for a while, it felt good.

But something started to erode quietly.

There were two or three layers of separation between the client and me. This was our structure: the client spoke with the project manager, who spoke with the creative director, who spoke with the art director, who spoke with me. By the time I understood what someone actually wanted, it had passed through enough hands that I was working from a translation of a translation. Every single project felt like the telephone game. And without being able to hear firsthand what a client actually cared about, the work stopped feeling like it meant anything. It was just output. Competent and professionally executed, but output nonetheless.

The work itself compounded the problem. All of our clients were in real estate (not a space generally known for creative ambition). The projects that kept the agency profitable were quick-turn videos, Google Ads, and Meta ads. Things that were fast and utilitarian. The work I actually loved—campaign creation, brand identity, custom web builds, anything that required real invention—kept getting pushed to the margins or went unappreciated by our clients. My creativity felt folded in on itself more often than not.

I knew for about a year before I left that I needed to leave. But I remembered the financial instability of freelancing too clearly to just walk away from a salary and benefits. I wasn’t willing to feel like a starving artist again, not this far into my career. So I stayed, and kept building STUDIO ANDOR quietly on the side, taking on clients, proving to myself that people not only respected the work but were willing to pay what it was actually worth.

I had almost worked up the nerve to put in my notice when the agency did a company-wide layoff. I was part of it. I walked out that day feeling a wave of peace wash over me.

It was like wanting to break up with someone, only for your partner to beat you to it. All the relief, none of the guilt.

Chapter 6 — Back to the Studio, Differently

I’ve been here before. A studio, my name on it, clients to serve, work to make. From the outside, it might look like I’ve come full circle. But the person running this studio now is not the person who left school expecting to land somewhere prestigious and stay forever. She knows things. And more importantly, she knows what she doesn’t want.

This time, everything feels different. And actually, it is. I finally know what I’m doing. The work feels like mine. I stopped second-guessing decisions that used to paralyze me. All of this came from having stood inside enough different versions of this industry to understand how it actually works.

The most important thing every stop taught me wasn’t about design; it was about foundation. When your business systems are solid, you stop spending creative energy on logistics. You get to focus on the things that actually matter: client relationships, compelling work, and strategy that’s timeless.

Last summer, I took a week off, did something I should have done years earlier, and treated STUDIO ANDOR as my own client. I wrote a full brand strategy document for myself, complete with tone of voice, ideal client profiles, and how every touchpoint should feel. I set up my internal structure. I put all of my client data into an invoicing platform. I implemented a project management system. I leveraged tools that didn’t even exist the first time I was freelancing—name-dropping AI here—so I could stop wearing every hat at once and start wearing only the ones that were actually mine to wear.

I also stopped being afraid to talk about money. That one took the longest. But somewhere along the loop, I realized that my service is a product. You don’t haggle over the price of a well-made garment at a boutique or question what’s on the price tag at a grocery store; you trust that it’s priced as it should be. I started treating my work the same way, and the right clients respected it immediately.

That week changed everything. Not because I figured out something new, but because I finally built the container that all of those years of experience had been waiting to live inside.

STUDIO ANDOR, powered by Dubsado, ClickUp, and Claude

If I Were Starting Over: Five Things I’d Do Differently

These aren’t rules. They’re the things I had to learn the hard way, over a decade, across five very different environments. Take what’s useful.

1. Learn to talk about money before you think you’re ready.

Most designers wait until they’ve been burned—underpaid, ghosted on an invoice, or trapped in a scope that doubled without warning—before they figure out how to have the money conversation. Please don’t wait. Read one book on negotiation. Or a podcast if that’s more your speed. Send the awkward follow-up email. Raise your rate before you feel ready. None of it gets easier by waiting, and the practice is the point.

2. Work inside something before you try to run something.

They told me this in school, and I had to learn it the hard way, IRL. In-house is underrated as an education. Watching how decisions get made from the inside—how budgets move, how approvals work, how a brand actually operates day to day—changes how you design and how you sell your work. Go in intentionally, learn what you came for, and know when it’s time to leave (don’t make the same mistake I did…twice).

3. Get close to a business owner as early as possible.

I’m not saying just to schmooze or network. Having a mentor or working directly under someone shows you firsthand how they think about risk, how they talk to clients, and how they make decisions with incomplete information. Designers who understand business think differently about their work. They’re more valuable, harder to lowball, and clearer about what they’re actually selling. Learn from those who went before you.

4. Build your foundation before you need it.

Let me say this again: build your foundation FIRST. The invoice template, the onboarding process, the project management system, the brand voice for your own studio…build all of it once, build it properly, and you never have to think about it again. Every hour you spend reinventing the wheel is an hour you’re not spending on the work that actually matters. Your systems are what set you free.

5. Stop optimizing for the resume and start optimizing for the education.

Every move I made looked a little unconventional on paper. But each one was filling in something I was missing. The question to ask at every stage isn’t “does this look good “. It’s “what will I know at the end of this that I don’t know now”. The loop was the point. And I’m thankful for every stop on that loop.

Why The MDA Exists

Everything I just described took me over a decade. And most of it I figured out alone through bad clients, wrong moves, burnout, layoffs, and a lot of late nights Googling things I should have learned in school.

There was no community I could point to that understood the specific intersection I was living in. I had a few friends who did semi-similar stuff, but I needed someone who encompassed all three (design + business + creative life) at once, in real time. The loneliness of that is something I don’t think designers talk about enough. We make consequential decisions about our careers, pricing, clients, identity, and more, and we’re largely doing so in a vacuum.

That’s why I built The Collective.

This is not a course or a mentorship program that ends with a certificate. Instead, this is the room I wished had existed when I was starting out (and honestly, when I was in the middle of it too). The Collective will be a place where designers at every stage of the loop can think out loud, ask the uncomfortable questions, and be in conversation with people who actually get it.

MDA exists because mastering this craft is only part of the work. The other part— business, the positioning, the confidence, the systems, the self-knowledge—that’s what The Collective is for.

If any part of this essay felt like something you needed to hear, you’re exactly who I built this for.

Class Dismissed

This week’s homework is to introduce yourself in the Chat. Don’t be shy! The MDA Collective is built to bring us together and strengthen our fellow designers.