Posture

On the visionary role and what distorts it.

The relationship between a designer and a client is fragile and built on a kind of interpersonal alchemy—trust, admiration, and the sense that the designer is the visionary guiding the project. That posture is clearest in the moments when the designer is talking about narrative, materiality, and the reasoning behind the decisions that resolve a space.
But when too many operational tensions land on the designer, that posture shifts. One meeting they arrive as the creative force; the next they’re addressing an overdue invoice or a boundary that’s been pushed. The client meets two versions of the same person—the visionary and the enforcer—and the coherence of that role begins to thin.

Most studios don’t intend for this split to happen. It just does. In the absence of a defined operational structure, the heavier parts of the business naturally fall to the principal or other members of the design team: the money conversations, the reminders about approvals, the enforcement of terms, the moments that carry consequence. Each time a designer steps into these moments without support, they shift into a posture that pulls them out of the role the client expects them to lead from.

The client may not articulate that shift, but they feel it. The designer’s presence feels different. The intimacy changes texture.

This isn’t about shielding principals from the realities of running a business. They’ll always have conversations only they can lead—the nuanced ones, the directional ones, the ones drawn from context no one else holds. The issue is the volume. When every emotionally charged moment lands on the person responsible for the creative vision, the posture begins to fracture. The designer spends more time drafting careful language around friction than protecting the focused mental and energetic space their creative work requires.

Studios that avoid this dynamic are defining responsibilities. They build a structure that sets the terms once, clearly, so the designer isn’t reinventing their stance or policy every time a tension point appears. The steps are known. The language is already shaped. The boundaries are articulated in advance. And someone else—an operations partner, a studio manager, a fractional support role—carries the weight of enforcing what the principal has already defined.
The team moves with clarity because they aren’t navigating ambiguous ground.

When that support exists, the designer gets to stay in the posture the client recognizes: the visionary, the guide, the person leading them through a thoughtful creative process. And the client remains anchored in that dynamic instead of oscillating between two versions of the same person. The relationship holds its coherence. The work is received in the light it deserves.

And the studio moves with a steadiness that protects both the work and the relationships at the center of it.

On Beginning

A welcome, an orientation.

There are a few ways to arrive at the work that ends up shaping you.
Some people choose it directly. Others move toward it slowly, orbiting the edges until the shape comes into focus.
I’m the latter.

My path has always moved through beauty—spaces, objects, art, the environments people build around themselves. For years, I lived inside that world from multiple angles: through EastCo, the Austin showroom I built, and through my own design practice. Those chapters ran in parallel, forming my eye, my instincts, my understanding of the emotional weight of this profession, and the realities of what it takes to run a creative business.

The shift revealed itself later, in another studio. I had been hired as a senior designer, but the work kept collapsing under the absence of structure. It became impossible to do the creative without first building the operational spine beneath it. My attention began to move— almost automatically—toward the systems and clarity the studio needed simply to stand. I stopped designing and began structuring, simply out of necessity.

That was the moment something in me clicked. I had shaped structure before—across years of my own practice—but doing it inside someone else’s studio, with her holding the creative lead, revealed a truth I hadn’t named: that I felt most myself in the architecture behind the work. There was a steadiness in supporting the work rather than steering it.

From that vantage point, the work looked different to me.

I began to see that the structure beneath a studio becomes the window through which the work is viewed—by the designer trying to hold the vision, and by the clients trying to understand it.
When the window is clean, the work is seen as true — its beauty legible, its honest intent clear.
When it’s clouded by confusion or disarray, even the most beautiful resolve is perceived through a distorted haze.

That recognition became the foundation of what I do now.

Today, I work with designers in a role that sits adjacent to the creative—close enough to understand and appreciate it, far enough to see its structure and shape.

Strategy, operations, language, boundaries, expectation-setting, leadership: the architecture that supports the visible work. My vantage point lets me see patterns that are hard to notice from inside a studio, and to build clarity that allows the creative side to move with more ease and intention.

Writing grew from that same place.
It offers a way to think through the profession’s unseen layers, to name the forces that shape the work, to explore what rarely enters the public story. And it gives the creative part of me a place to move again — a different medium, but the same impulse to articulate, to refine, to make meaning.

This space exists for the designers who live inside all of that complexity.
For those carrying both the magic and the weight.
For those who feel the depth of their work even when its public story feels too thin.

My hope is that it becomes a commons—a place to read, to reflect, to recognize yourself in the larger narrative of this profession. A place where the structure behind the work comes into view, and where the full story of the work can finally be seen.

Let’s begin.