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Avia Studio writing on process.

What we learned shipping eight brands in twelve months

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Last year, our four-person studio shipped eight full brand and web identities for Series A startups. None of the projects ran late. None went over scope by more than fifteen percent. We thought we’d collapse halfway through. We didn’t. Here’s what made it possible — and what we’d change.

The non-negotiable: scope locks at week two

Every project has a discovery phase. Ours was three working sessions in week one, followed by a written scope document signed by the founder in week two. After that, anything new is a change request that adds time and cost. No exceptions, no goodwill creep.

We held the line on this for six of the eight projects. The two we softened on — both founders we adored — ran the longest and burned us out the most. The lesson held: scope discipline is kindness, not coldness.

The unexpected bottleneck: feedback loops

We expected design execution to be the constraint. It wasn’t. The constraint was feedback turnaround. A two-day delay in client review compounded across six rounds of work on each project, becoming weeks. We started scheduling weekly thirty-minute review calls instead of waiting for async comments. Cycle time dropped 40%.

The thing that broke: archive discipline

By month nine we couldn’t find anything. Project files lived across Figma, Notion, Dropbox, Slack threads, and individual desktops. We spent half a day every week looking for assets we’d shipped six weeks earlier. We rebuilt our internal asset architecture in December. The next year of project starts cost half as much in onboarding overhead.

What we’d do differently

Hire one more person. We treated four as a feature; it was actually a bottleneck. The fifth role — a junior brand designer who could own the long-tail asset production — would have given us another four projects in the same year without the burnout.

Why we kill 30% of the ideas we love

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Roughly a third of the design work we love internally never reaches the client. We kill it before it leaves the studio. This is not a quality control problem. It is the quality control system.

The first cut: directional review

Every project has an internal review at the end of the first design week. The team presents three to five directions. The studio principal asks one question: which of these is the strongest position for the company we’re working with? The other directions die.

This sounds harsh. It is. Designers are emotionally invested in directions they’ve spent a week on. The cull is hard. But sending three directions to a client and letting them pick is not a service — it is offloading the studio’s expertise back to the founder, who hired us specifically because they did not have the expertise to make that call.

The second cut: production review

By week four we have a fully-built brand system: typography, color, lockups, motion, applied across mock surfaces. The studio principal sits with the team and asks: would I send this in five years and feel proud? If the answer is qualified — “yes, with some tweaks,” “yes, mostly” — we go back another week.

Roughly a third of week four reviews fail this test. The cost is real. The studio loses a week of margin on the project. The team loses a week of energy. But the alternative — shipping work that is “almost there” — costs the client a brand they will need to redo in eighteen months. We carry the cost so they don’t have to.

What the cull rate produces

The work that survives both cuts is the work the team is unambiguously proud to ship. There is no “I would have wanted to push this further.” There is no “I think this is what they wanted, even though I wasn’t sure.” The work has been beaten on internally for two and a half weeks before the client sees it. By the time it arrives, it is done.

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