charlota

I’m starting a new series: Working Notes. Twitter is full of beautiful, finished design artifacts. But this is about the tiny heuristics, visual judgment calls, and lessons learned from my time at IDEO and running my design practice. With all the mistakes and re-do’s. The stuff that helps you escape junior mode. aaaand best unexpected thing: I got a cool partner for this series, who cares about the next generation of designers - @framer! let's go - bookmark this tweet so you can come back to the thread!

Trust the signals. Brand identity, website and storytelling for Karma3 Labs, an onchain reputation protocol. One dot-matrix system, from the logo to a billboard. “The smoothest branding and web design process I’ve ever encountered” — @SahilDewan, co-founder 2023 at @WE3co

Inter is like the most neutral sans serif font there is: calling it ai slop is like calling the colour grey or a rectangular shape a slop.

Kind of shocked by how many DMs I got that just said “hi, saw you’re looking for an illustrator, can you share more details?” you’re not shooting your shot. try: “Hi, re: your tweet — here’s my portfolio. I specialise in XY, available from [date], my usual starting rate from XX” the person on the other side is going through dozens of portfolios. If your work fits, they’ll reach out. Every extra step you add (“i'm happy to share my portfolio!” and not sharing it) is one more thing they have to do before even seeing your work. Freelance 101: have your work somewhere linkable, and share it with zero friction. that’s how you increase your luck surface area. am I asking too much here, or is this genuinely freelance 101?

this 👇

it pays off to track your hours! I ran the numbers on this year and last year of my solo brand & web design practice. Here’s what surprised me: 1. Business development (every new lead call, proposal and final contract) takes only 5% of my time. 2. Where the hours go in my brand projects: 13% exploring: gathering inspo, moodboards, logo sketches 27% concepting: brand identity concepts, concept decks 25% production: website design, social media templates, final brand assets... 23% finalising: revision rounds, documenting guidelines 12% calls & meetings Finishing touches and documentation take as long as production of the actual design. 3. Time spent in call depend on who’s on the other side. Founder-led startups: 1–7% of project hours. Larger teams: 15–19%. that’s why I love working with startups: calls are short, focused, and decisions get made. with bigger clients, I now need to price in project management better. 4. 12 hours of "play mode" earned me more than any single client project this year. A side experiment I vibecoded in an afternoon won the Figma Makeathon $50k prize. I guess I should now block time for play on purpose. :)) 5. I’ve set up my work so I actually get time with my family, and the numbers show it’s working. even in my busiest months I worked only ~70% of full-time hours.

lots of new faces here lately, so a proper intro 👋 I'm Charlota, and i design identities and websites for early-stage tech founders. the moment you've built something promising and it still looks like a side project, that's where I come in. most of my clients are in AI, health and kids-tech (plus a big crypto chapter in the archive). founders who move fast, and want a designer-generalist, who can give them a strong brand foundation that helps them launch successfully, attract the right investors and talent. here's some of the work ↓

best time to be a senior designer. hardest time to become one. if you have some experience, especially as a generalist with a bit of AI curiosity, imo, this moment is great. i feel like i just gained an army of junior designers, without having to build an agency. i can explore wider, try more things, move faster. the 100 layout ideas i'd normally get from a junior, i now get from AI. then i curate, pull what works, and build on it by hand. knowing what works and what doesn't is the part years of practice gave me. BUT here's the uncomfortable part. i've always been proud of my profession. but if a young person asked me today whether to get into design, i'm not sure i'd recommend it. most of us learned by doing thousands of reps. the same ad banner laid out in ten sizes and ten variations.
preparing files for print, and getting it wrong a few times. hours of trying layout after layout until one finally clicked.
 however, that's the work AI now does in no time. it gets a layout or an interface to 60–70% right, immediately. which is roughly where most of us landed as juniors. so why wait a day for someone to bring you 30 layout variations when you can have them in 10 minutes? where are the junior roles going to come from now? and who's going to train the next generation of designers? i feel more empowered in my work than ever, and genuinely excited about it. and at the same time, a bit gloomy about who comes after us.

first in my bloodline to zoom to 800% to check if two lines touch, and get paid for it

in my brand identity design process, I make a lot of vibe-coded, throwaway design tools. they're not deliverables. they're tools for thinking. here I was exploring logo ideas built from dots arranged in rings and grids, so I spun up a little artifact in Claude with controls for ring count, spacing, twist and symmetry. This is where AI helps me explore more broadly. things I'd normally arrange by hand in Illustrator or sketch on paper become something I can play with and push around, encouraging happy accidents to happen.

you might be using figma, framer, paper, pen… but are you a real designer if you are not using the square???

Logo designers: which letter is the hardest to turn into an icon because it's been done a million times? my picks: S, H: symmetrical, every mirror trick is already taken O: only so many ways to arrange shapes in a circle D: one curve away from looking like an O M: all symmetrical tricks taken have been used already, plus it's just a W upside down H: one mistake and you're in X territory fast A: a triangle with a dash, see also every mountain logo I: i mean, what can you really do here??

may this type of client find you too 🙏

yes.

nope, but we asked our ai agent that orders groceries to always add in some surprise snacks from brands we haven’t tried yet (it knows based on the shopping history), and it’s been fun

friendly reminder to everyone in my DMs: share your work! “do you need an illustrator?” “i’d be happy to share my portfolio” well. then. just. share. the portfolio. it’s freelance 101: show, don’t ask.