Closing the studio

I'm closing Memora.

For four years it was the name I did client work under. Brand and product for Botto, Zara, Fabrica, Tokenomist, and Range, among others. The work was good. The wrapper stopped making sense.

Two things happened at once.

The first is that nobody was hiring a studio. They were hiring me. Every project started from something I'd said or made, never from a services page.

I brought in animators and illustrators, and for a stretch another designer worked with me full time. Good people, and the work was better for having them on it. But the direction was always mine: the taste, the calls, what shipped and what didn't. What I brought in was capacity, never judgment.

The second is that the judgment became the whole job.

I barely open Figma now. I design in code, with agents running in parallel. Most of the work sits upstream of any screen: building the system things come out of, and setting foundations solid enough that everything downstream inherits them instead of being rebuilt by hand.

What that collapses is the distance between deciding something and having it exist. Execution used to be most of the work and most of the cost. Buying more of it was what a studio was for. That's not where the constraint is anymore.

The constraint is knowing what should exist, and caring enough to get it right at a level nobody asked you for.

So the studio was solving a problem I no longer have. Not because anyone was replaceable. Because capacity stopped being the scarce part, and judgment was the only thing I was ever really selling.

How that actually works day to day is its own post. I'll write it.

What I'm doing instead

All of it goes into Range, where I'm the founding designer. Risk and compliance for digital assets. Agents, dense data, and money that moves.

We build the way I described above, and agents are going into the products themselves. That's the part I find interesting. An agent that drafts a landing page can be wrong and you just run it again. One that touches money can't.

So the work is making all of that weight invisible. The rules, the checks, the reasons something is or isn't allowed. Someone using it should feel like they got a clear answer, not like they're operating machinery. That's a design problem more than a technical one, and nobody has really solved it yet.

We're hiring designers

I'm looking for people who read the above and felt something. Not AI will replace designers, not AI is a toy. The third reaction, the one that goes I want to work like that.

Concretely: you ask product questions before you open a canvas. You have taste and you can defend it. Your craft holds up when someone zooms in. You go find the new tool instead of waiting for it to become standard. And you'd rather dig into a problem nobody has solved than be handed a spec.

Vision without craft is a deck. Craft without vision is decoration. The job needs both, and the bar for both went up, not down.

If that's you, write to me.