Before moving to New York in 2017 I helped run two branding studios—one based in Texas and the other based in Los Angeles. During that time I worked directly with clients from defining scope of work, to strategy meetings and presentations. It was also my responsibility to work with external vendors like web developers, sign painters, and printers to ensure designs were made to specification and fit for use in environment.

Many of these responsibilities continued during my time at Louise Fili Ltd. Then in the spring of 2020 during lockdown, I was tasked with re-organizing our studio workflow to be remote capable. Together with my studio-mate Matthew Smith, we migrated our entire studio archive onto a cloud platform (over thirty years worth of work and data across multiple storage types, some analog).

In that same year I—alongside Matt and Louise—began building what would become our type foundry, Tipofili. What started as an ambition to create a home for the fonts we were making quickly morphed into discussions about incorporating a business, meetings with lawyers about license agreements, and solving how to make our remote operations feel as collaborative as when we all sat around the conference table in our 23rd street studio. The latter involved assembling a lattice-work of tools that organized our work, conversations, and weekly meetings. Over time we also developed methods to make whiteboard sessions and font reviews more collaborative in real time. Now three years later, I’ve found this operational work to be invaluable when we meet to discuss things like updates to our website, social media posts, and new ways to promote our fonts.

While I did not set out to be a business-person when I got my art degree in college, I have found a lot of satisfaction and appreciation in learning the business of running a design studio, and the work of improving those operations has been a creative act all its own.