Caps for Sale
As an independent designer, I've become accustomed to performing many duties alongside my primary creative role. There are business development and client relations issues to consider, invoices to send and books to keep, plus a confusing array of bureaucratic and legal imperatives with which to contend. These tasks — though sometimes challenging — provide an ongoing learning experience outside of my comfort zone and unlike design, often have straightforward, "correct" solutions.
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For this reason, shifting among these various duties, with their cut-and-dry remedies, is often a far simpler undertaking than juggling multiple creative tasks at once. In the course of designing and coding a website, for example, I find myself continuously oscillating between technical challenges and design considerations, making incremental changes to both in a seemingly endless back and forth. Working alone, this cycle was killing my productivity and depleting my energy. It became startlingly obvious that I needed help, and hence Remedie Studio was born.
Partnering up has been one of the best professional decisions I have ever made. The quality and quantity of my work has vastly improved as we've spread the creative load and developed best practices for each project type. Of course, some improvements boil down to actually having an established and set way of doing things, but on a greater level, the ability to focus on the particulars of a single stage of one design solution at a time has been nothing short of revolutionary. Productivity is up, attention to detail is more uniform, and there's always a trusted, creative mind off which to bounce ideas. Our potential seems greater, our confidence fuller and our creativity broader. We are each comfortable wearing the many hats of an independent designer, but now we needn't wear all of them at once.