{"id":180722,"date":"2025-12-08T08:24:19","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T08:24:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/180722\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T08:24:19","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T08:24:19","slug":"elizabeth-goodspeed-on-how-many-designers-it-takes-to-make-a-studio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/180722\/","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Goodspeed on how many designers it takes to make a studio"},"content":{"rendered":"

For others, starting a studio is more about catching up with an existing reality. Before she was (Studio) Lotta Nieminen<\/a>, Finnish designer Lotta Nieminen had built nearly a decade of experience designing for agencies and brands and illustrating for children\u2019s books<\/a> and clients like Bvlgari, Marimekko, Liberty, and Herman Miller. From 2012-2021, she operated as Lotta Nieminen, human being, balancing design and illustration under a name that carried weight across disciplines. By 2021, the work had shifted. Lotta was focused solely on design, and taking on larger, more complex projects. \u201cEven though it was still just me, I was booked out months ahead and taking on larger clients,\u201d she says. The optics hadn\u2019t caught up. \u201cBefore I added \u2018studio\u2019, I got a lot more inquiries for in-house gigs \u2013\u00a0which wasn\u2019t something I was looking for, or even able to do, since I was running my own practice full-time,\u201d she says. \u201cI realised I kept having to explain to people: I\u2019m not a freelancer, I\u2019m a studio.\u201d Adding \u201cStudio\u201d made her circumstances legible.<\/p>\n

By definition and title, A Present Force and (Studio) Lotta Nieminen are studios. But both Meredith and Lotta are adamant that clients understand what they\u2019re actually getting when they hire them, which is, most of the time: Meredith and Lotta. To wit: even on Linkedin, Meredith describes her role at A Present Force (0-1 employees) as \u201cIndependent Design Lead at A Present Force,\u201d not \u201cStudio Founder\u201d. On Meredith\u2019s About page and in introductory calls, she\u2019s slightly more precise, describing the studio as a \u201ccollective model\u201d run by one creative director. In practice, this means she works directly and independently with clients, as well with a network of collaborators as needed. Basically, if she can\u2019t make it with her own two hands, she\u2019ll find someone who can, and hire them for you. Lotta is similarly clear about her micro-size, preferring to never use the all-powerful \u201cwe\u201d to avoid artificially inflating herself. This kind of transparency is the opposite of the hustle-bro model you see on Linkedin and X where designers brag about a studio headcount that doesn\u2019t exist \u2013\u00a0the studio as \u201cfake it \u2019til you make it\u201d. Neither Lotta or Meredith are interested in pretending to be any larger than they are. Still, misunderstandings happen. One recent client of Meredith\u2019s assumed she had a full team of developers on standby from their first intro call, and expected an instant buildout. \u201cI had to cut them off and say, no, no, no \u2013\u00a0I just started doing this. If we need a developer, I\u2019ll find one. But I need time to price it, resource it\u2026 There\u2019s no one on staff waiting in the wings.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For others, starting a studio is more about catching up with an existing reality. Before she was (Studio)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-180722","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}