15 years of figuring shit out.

I’ve been doing this work for more than fifteen years. I’d love to tell you there was a beautifully considered strategy behind every stage of it, but that would be a fairly ambitious rewrite of events.

Some of the early work involved walking into small businesses in places like Browns Bay in Auckland and talking to the owner about getting them online. There was a clothes shop, a business somebody had built, customers coming through the door and an opportunity to give it a presence beyond that street.

We were offering websites. Not presenting a grand philosophy of brand identity over a three-hour session. The immediate job was practical: help the business show up online.

Learning what the work needed

As the work developed, branding became a bigger part of it. And I went through the process a lot of designers will recognise. Ask what colours the client likes. Ask for logos they admire. Work out whether they want something modern or traditional. Present some options. Wait for feedback.

Then some more feedback. Then perhaps a version that combines the bit they liked from option one with something from option three.

The website could follow the same pattern. This heading from one reference, that footer from another. The client keeps directing and the designer keeps rearranging. Everybody is working, but it becomes surprisingly difficult to explain what is making the result right for the business.

I got stuck in those loops myself. I’m not describing somebody else’s bad process so I can pretend I arrived fully formed with a better one.

What I began to understand was that I was asking clients to make decisions they had hired us to help with. Their taste mattered, but it was doing too much of the work. We could produce something they liked without having properly established what the identity needed to say or who it needed to reach.

The change was learning to start further back. Understand the business before collecting visual preferences. Listen to the story, question the contradictions and work out what gave it a direction. Then bring a considered interpretation, rather than another menu of possibilities the client had to figure out alone.

Starting further back

That did not happen because I stopped caring about design and decided conversations were more important. It happened because I wanted the design to mean something and the process of getting there to be better for everyone.

I’ve always been interested in people: how they see themselves, what they are trying to communicate and why something that sounds straightforward can be difficult to say. Over time, that interest became a much more deliberate part of the work. So did the confidence to make a recommendation and explain it.

It also taught me to distinguish a focused job from a deeper engagement. Not every business needs an extensive discovery process. Sometimes a properly scoped logo and one-page website is exactly what is useful. The important thing is being clear about the job and bringing judgement to it, rather than dressing every request up as a transformation.

Experience helps you notice patterns. A familiar sort of uncertainty in the brief. A conversation that keeps returning to the same point. A proposed solution that does not seem connected to the stated problem. Those are reasons to ask better questions, not permission to stop listening because you have seen something similar before.

I am more comfortable now saying that we do not know something yet. I am also more aware of when somebody with particular expertise needs to be involved. Confidence is useful. Pretending is expensive.

The work has grown from those early websites into identities, more involved digital builds, creative ideas and long client relationships. Awove’s approach has grown with it. There have been good decisions, mistakes and plenty of details we would handle differently with what we know now.

What still makes me want to do it is the moment something becomes clear. Sometimes that happens in the conversation. Sometimes it happens when the client sees what the team has made and recognises their business in it.

I still care about both. Finding the understanding and doing it justice in the work.

Fifteen years hasn’t given me an answer to every brief. It has given me a much better sense of where to start, what deserves another question and why getting it right matters.