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Branding Masterclass for AI FoundersㅣSmith & Diction

EO32:34Added Aug 31, 2026

This is the story of Smith & Diction, the design agency behind some of the most talked-about rebrands—Perplexity, Anterior, Alma, Exposure, and Gamma—all cra...

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Contributed by 刘嘉琪

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  1. Intro

  2. 00:00Copywriting is either the easiest job in the world or the hardest job in the world. So to me, the main difference
  3. 00:05between fine copy and good copy is what's the emotion. I think the biggest
  4. 00:11mistake that happens when you're creating brands is that sometimes people think it's like logo type color, but
  5. 00:16realistically there's so much more. I see a ton of ads, especially in the AI space, that are all about efficiency.
  6. 00:23And I just think it's ridiculous. You could stop a thousand people on the street and ask them what they want in
  7. 00:28life and no one is going to say, "I really wish I was more efficient." I am Mike Smith. I run uh Smith and Diction
  8. 00:35with my wife Cara in the beautiful Bach building in Philadelphia. Smith Andiction is a design studio. We mainly
  9. 00:40focus on creating thoughtful identities for imaginative clients. We work on companies like Perplexity, Gamma,
  10. 00:47Exposure, and Anterior. Just anything that feels really, really unique. I'm Cara Smith and I run Smith and Addiction
  11. 00:54with my husband Mike. I run most of the addiction side of what we do. So I oversee all of our STR brand strategy
  12. 01:00and messaging and copywriting. Our approach is pretty different in that we're small. We're intentionally a small
  13. 01:05team. So everyone we work with works directly with us. Mike and I are the founders and we also lead the project.
  14. 01:11So at a traditional big agency, the people who are started the company, the people who run the company, they're not
  15. 01:16the ones actually doing the work. They're not the people doing the writing and doing the design. And here that's the opposite. So we are not only the
  16. 01:23people who started the company and who run the company, but we also are the people doing a majority of the work. So I handle a lot of the copywriting and
  17. 01:29strategy myself. Mike leads all of the design along with his team. So you just get so much more connection between the
  18. 01:36people who we're working with, our partners, our clients, and our team because we're just the lynch pin between
  19. 01:41those two. Everybody has a brand. Brand is

  20. Branding and Copywriting 101

  21. 01:48simply how people see you, right? So whether you spend a lot of time and
  22. 01:54money developing a brand or you don't, like Mike was talking about, like our favorite bagel shop where it's just a
  23. 01:59bag and it's like a Sharpie on a paper bag, that is still a brand even though there was no money spent on that brand.
  24. 02:05And it's letting people know we do not care about design. We only care about making the best bagels in this city. and
  25. 02:12you're conveying that through that medium even even if you didn't spend a single dime on that. And I think the
  26. 02:19thing that a lot of people miss about brand is that if you choose not to invest in it, you still have one. People
  27. 02:24will see you in a certain way. If you have a social media ad, then you you have an avatar. And what does that look
  28. 02:30like and what does that tell people about you? So, I like to think that what we do is we just help you understand
  29. 02:36what your brand is and you be in control of your brand instead of letting your audience decide your brand because
  30. 02:41you're not quite aware or you don't have a handle on it. So, and I think that's one of those things that when we give
  31. 02:46you a brand toolkit, that's not the end of the conversation, right? Like branding as an exercise doesn't mean
  32. 02:52like it's not a thing that you buy and then like great, I bought my brand. A brand is what you do every single day.
  33. 02:57Every single interaction you have is a part of your brand. every single customer service conversation, every single uh moment that somebody spends in
  34. 03:04your platform on your product if you're a client like Gamma, those are all part of your brand and we just give you the
  35. 03:11tools at the beginning to say, "Okay, here's here's how you can create a brand that will reach your audience. Here's
  36. 03:16the toolkit." And then you have to go out and you have to live that brand and be that brand every single day. So that's my like speech of like brand, you
  37. 03:23can't just like buy a brand. brand is how people see you. And how people see you will continue to change with everything that you do and every
  38. 03:29interactions that they have. And you can choose whether those interactions are better and better and they're more and
  39. 03:34more interested in being in your club or whether every time they interact with your customer service, they have a worse and worse impression of your brand. And
  40. 03:40then it doesn't matter how much money you spend on design if your customer service team isn't delivering on the qualities that your brand is conveying.
  41. 03:46Branding to me is just like what would you put a sticker on your car or your
  42. 03:52notebook or your laptop? Like a good brand is one of those things that exists
  43. 03:57more than just a a transaction. It's something that becomes part of your life. And I think that when you are
  44. 04:04creating a brand, it's so easy to think transactional. It's so easy to be like, "Oh, I want people to download this
  45. 04:10product or I want people to use this uh this, you know, menu or something, but I
  46. 04:16want people to want to live their life with that brand as part of their mental
  47. 04:23kind of like ecosystem." For me, the Vulc logo, when I was growing up skateboarding, I drew that logo on
  48. 04:30everything, every book, every year, every class. I I was just so obsessed with how beautiful and simple it was. So
  49. 04:37to me, I think that a brand is just something that like it pulls you in. It's almost like a gem or a crystal that
  50. 04:43you're just like you can't help but want to be near or can't help but you want to hold it. When you look at some of the
  51. 04:49brands we've made, I try to always make them have a little bit of tangible quality to them. Uh so people can
  52. 04:55actually feel like they can reach out and grab it or it could sit on your desk as like this really cool paper weight or
  53. 05:02something like that. Why is branding important for business for like products and things like that? I think that
  54. 05:08branding is important in that use case because it's the easier and easier it
  55. 05:13gets to make stuff the more that brand will actually make things that people want to have in their lives. When you
  56. 05:19have a product or something like you know I open Instagram every day like every single day I am influenced by the
  57. 05:26AI or the the UI in that product. it would be a disservice to not treat
  58. 05:32people with the with the respect of like you care about what's in their hand.
  59. 05:37when you're kind of invading people's lives, the least you can do is is respect the the attention that they are
  60. 05:44giving you uh and making a product or a UI or whatever a brand that feels like
  61. 05:50it's actually making their life better or making their life easier or making their life more fun or they're smiling
  62. 05:56when they open the app or something like that because there are so many things that want to take away your energy and
  63. 06:02take away your happiness that like I feel like it's brand's job or It's a brand's job to make you feel a little
  64. 06:09bit better, but it doesn't work like that. Doesn't work like that as much anymore. To me, I think the biggest
  65. 06:15mistake that and I don't even know if it's founders. I think the biggest mistake that happens when you're creating brands is that sometimes people
  66. 06:21think it's like logo type color. There is like that's the trifecta of brand. But realistically, there's so much more.
  67. 06:28There's so much more interesting things that you can do with photography, art direction. You can make like a cool way
  68. 06:36that you know the the type skews to represent motion or you can even bring in some sort of like really exciting uh
  69. 06:44movement in terms of like okay we're going to have this image be blurred or this image has like a 3D effect or it
  70. 06:51has like this uh X-ray MRI scan and coloring to for like a uh you know a
  71. 06:58healthcare company or something like that. people are so so quick to just be like, "Oh, no. I just need a logo. I
  72. 07:04just want to put a logo on a PowerPoint, you know, cover or something like that." And I think that brand is so much deeper
  73. 07:10than that. And I feel like if you're approaching it in this shallow kind of way, people will get to the bottom of it
  74. 07:16really quickly. And I think that that is something that is a very dangerous territory because like you're relying on
  75. 07:22the product to be absolutely impeccable if the brand is super super shallow. A
  76. 07:28verbal identity is all the words that you use to communicate. It kind of comes out of strategy. It, you know, often a
  77. 07:34strategy is mostly an inter internal facing document. It's mostly for your team if you're growing. It's things that
  78. 07:40you say to your team like, "Oh, here's the things that we value and we're never going to change or um here's what we're trying to do and and the way that we're
  79. 07:47going to position our company in order to do that." Verbal identity is once you cross that line between talking to your
  80. 07:52internal audience or maybe your partners and talking to your your external audience, right? So that's how do you
  81. 07:58what are your website going to say? What's the tone that you use? And then what are the actual words that you put
  82. 08:03on a website that you put on social posts that you put on ads that you put in a video? What's your tagline? What are your headlines? How do you talk
  83. 08:09about yourself? It's interesting because in some ways it's different than design because a lot of elements of design like
  84. 08:15a logo often you'll get a logo and you'll keep it and you won't touch it for a long time or you'll get a color
  85. 08:20palette and you'll sort of settle into that color palette and it doesn't change frequently. Words are different, right? So words change all the time and lots of
  86. 08:27people you're you know your website headline might change every couple of months who knows like you people are writing new elements and products all
  87. 08:33the time. So it's really important with a verbal identity to make sure you understand the overarching tone and
  88. 08:40personality of like who we are and how we talk so that then when you are writing new lines I mean never a verbal
  89. 08:46identity is never going to deliver all the words you ever need to use. Instead, it's just going to set the tone so that
  90. 08:51then you can continue to write new words that always feel on brand and like they're written by the same personality.
  91. 08:58Like for Gamma, for example, we worked on their verbal identity. The big idea that we really rooted everything in was
  92. 09:03this idea of get get your ideas out there. And we loved that as a starting point of when you think about who their
  93. 09:09audience is, they're not people who are so talented at designing a presentation
  94. 09:14or making their own website. there are people who are more interested in the ideas and just need it to get out there
  95. 09:20more quickly and that's exactly what Gamma does. So, we love this idea. Um, but then when you start to think, okay,
  96. 09:25what does that sound like? How do you express that idea to your audiences? We had so much fun working on the tone for
  97. 09:30this one because one of our tone words was imaginative and and so few brands get to be imaginative, you know, and I
  98. 09:37think there's just it's an unlock button when you get to say, "Oh, you don't have to use, you know, if I was a writer and
  99. 09:42somebody handed me a verbal identity that had imaginative, that means I get to use fun words." Like I don't have to
  100. 09:48use the same regular words that everybody else uses to say, "Start your presentation now." You can instead say,
  101. 09:53"Start a presentation about, I don't know, exploring the ocean now." And you can suddenly start to put a lot more
  102. 10:00personality into that brand because you have a verbal identity that tells you right from the beginning, use your
  103. 10:05imagination, do something interesting, do something different. We've built verbal identities for lots of clients. We're working right now with a client
  104. 10:11called Contra that helps uh freelancers get paid. And so they were a really really tricky verbal identity because
  105. 10:18they have two very distinct audiences, right? So that on the one hand they have the people who are freelancers, people
  106. 10:23who get want to get more jobs and get paid. Maybe they're a designer, maybe they're an animator, maybe they're a
  107. 10:28writer, maybe they're a developer, maybe they're a videographer, who knows? But they want sort of more 1099 work. They
  108. 10:34want to show their work off um and get hired. And then on the other side, you have the people who are going to hire them. And their reasons for being on
  109. 10:41Contra are very different because of those two audiences. So, it took us a lot of work to figure out how do we
  110. 10:46connect with both of them at the same time and make sure that we're communicating slightly different
  111. 10:52offerings, slightly different values, but in the same tone that feels consistent across the board and using
  112. 10:58the same sort of core messaging across the board. Our concept for them was get more creative because whether you're a
  113. 11:04creative a self-described creative person who's trying to get more work, it's this is a way for you to get more
  114. 11:09creative work, right? And on the other hand, if you're somebody who's trying to hire more creatives, you can get more creative team. You can get more creative
  115. 11:16with the way that you're forming your business and growing your business. If you want to scale more quickly, you don't necessarily have to hire the
  116. 11:22traditional way. So, we love it because it allows you to sort of like fill in the blank after creative of get more creative and then you can say whatever
  117. 11:27it is that you want in your mind. So, being able to hit on something that felt really powerful for both of those audiences was really fun. I would say
  118. 11:34the most common mistake that I see is thinking that exactly what you want
  119. 11:39people to do is what you should write. And I think that doesn't happen in advertising. You know, in the big advertising world, people are really
  120. 11:46understand that you don't write a billboard that says buy more chocolate. You make people want chocolate, right?
  121. 11:52You make them think, oh, there's nothing better than a bar of chocolate right now. And I think when you when a lot of
  122. 11:58people go a lot of particularly like in the tech world people who are building products or like writing a website they
  123. 12:03forget that and they go out and they say buy now on their website which is not actually the best way to get somebody to
  124. 12:09buy something. What you have to do is make them want it. You have to appeal to an emotion inside of them and make that
  125. 12:16connection. Right? So, if I were to talk like broadly in the world right now, I see a ton of ads, especially in the AI
  126. 12:22space that are all about efficiency and I just think it's ridiculous because I look I you could not you could stop a
  127. 12:29thousand people on the street and ask them what they want in life and no one is going to say I really wish I was more efficient. Like that's not an emotion.
  128. 12:36That's not a thing that people want. It's a thing that people want for their teams. It's a thing they want for their companies. Maybe they want other people
  129. 12:42who are they're paying to be more efficient, but nobody wants that for themselves. So, I just think you have to connect with something beyond that,
  130. 12:49something that people actually want, something that feels positive to them instead of just saying AI, it'll make you more efficient. Like, that's not
  131. 12:55actually a thing people want to buy. So, let's move beyond the efficiency and figure out what can what can it provide that's a benefit to my life. Copywriting
  132. 13:01is so interesting. In one of my early jobs, I used to talk with one of my good copywriting friends about copywriting is
  133. 13:08either the easiest job in the world or the hardest job in the world. And it just all depends on how well you do it.
  134. 13:13And I think particularly now in the world of AI, if you're writing something that sounds like JT GPT could write it,
  135. 13:20then you're it's going to be hard out there because the the the reality is like there's a whole new set of tools
  136. 13:26that are going to be capable of writing copy. And the only thing we have the only leg up we have on chatbt, it's like
  137. 13:33it's not speed, it's not efficiency, but we can be more creative and we can think
  138. 13:38from like a more human perspective. So to me, the main difference between fine
  139. 13:44copy and good copy is what's the emotion? What's the feeling that's behind it? How do you make somebody read
  140. 13:50something and feel something? So I like to think of copywriting much more from a storytelling perspective or a cinematic
  141. 13:56perspective of like how do you make something feel emotional and strike a
  142. 14:03chord with somebody as opposed to simply conveying information, right? Of course, you want to convey information as well, especially when you're on a website and
  143. 14:09practical executions. A lot of bad copywriting stops at conveying information. It conveys information, and
  144. 14:15that's fine, but it doesn't make somebody feel something. And when I often hear people say things like, "Oh, people don't read anymore." I'm like,
  145. 14:21"That is so not true. People read all of Game of Thrones, and Game of Thrones was an incredibly long and incredibly dense
  146. 14:26book. Why? Because it was filled with emotion." People read a lot, but they only read when it makes them feel
  147. 14:32something, and they're not interested in reading very dense and informative information. So, I I think that the main
  148. 14:38differentiator if you want something to be good is for it to be emotional. And I think that's also happens to be what
  149. 14:43gives us a leg up on Chat GPT is because Chad GPT doesn't have any emotions. So, it can try to emulate emotion, but it
  150. 14:50can't genuinely understand the difference between who headlines. If one of those headlines makes your heart hurt
  151. 14:55and the other one doesn't, CHBT doesn't know the difference. technically they might be equal. So my advice to any
  152. 15:00copywriter out there would be like write with your heart. Like put as much emotion and heart as you can into
  153. 15:05everything and you're more likely to hit something that that changes the world or makes a

  154. Building the Perplexity and Gamma Brands

  155. 15:12difference. We've had clients before. So Perplexity in particular was a really
  156. 15:17hard client because their audience is literally everyone. Like they in the same way that like Google's audience is
  157. 15:23everyone. They want anyone on the planet to be able to go to Google and find something and perplexity wanted that
  158. 15:28same thing. So there was no like defining yeah but who's more likely to use this or who like no it's just how do
  159. 15:34you appeal to everyone all at the same time and that's really really hard. What they wanted to do was so aspirational
  160. 15:40and so we were somewhat lucky in that we did it a little bit earlier. I feel like
  161. 15:45the AI field is messier now and it's more crowded now than it was. But at the time it felt like there were only a few
  162. 15:52serious contenders in AI. And so it was much easier to be like okay as opposed to chat GBT and you know maybe co-pilot
  163. 15:59like what do you do differently than the the key ones. I think Bard was at the time we were looking at Bard as one of their competitors and so um it we really
  164. 16:08quickly came to this fact that they had citations and no one else at the time was doing it in quite the same way. It
  165. 16:14allowed you to turn your AI experience from, you know, chatbt, you ask
  166. 16:20something, it gives you information and that's sort of like a dead end into a portal to everything, right? So like
  167. 16:26basically turning it into like what Google used to be, which is the front page of the internet. Like perplexity is now your your starting point and then
  168. 16:32you can click any of those citation links and go anywhere you want to go. So we were eventually able to hone in on
  169. 16:39like this one differentiator that set them apart, which is the difference between perplexity and a chatbt. Chatbt
  170. 16:45is like great, we're going to give you an answer to your problem. Perplexity is going to open up doors to knowledge. So
  171. 16:51you're going to be able to continue to discover, right? And there is a very big difference between like, I want to know
  172. 16:56something, great, here's the answer. It's like the old classic like are you going to give somebody a fish? Are you going to teach them to fish? It's like
  173. 17:02are you going to say great here's the answer great now I know the answer and I'm done with this interaction or are you going to say here's the information
  174. 17:07and if you would like to learn more about that here's all the places that you can go that language of like circling around the idea of knowledge
  175. 17:14and then that's circling around perplexity as the place where it begins like everything starts here but then it can go further and eventually that
  176. 17:20became the headline of like you know where knowledge begins which is really beautiful but for the most part something like gamma it's actually
  177. 17:26easier than that because you can think about okay maybe you want everyone to be able to use gamma ultimately, but who
  178. 17:33are there are certainly people who for whom it's more it's a better bet that they're going to be using it. So like I
  179. 17:39think about gamma and sometimes it's helpful to think about who it's not for, right? So gamma is like not for my mom. She doesn't like computers. She's scared
  180. 17:45of AI. Like this is not her feature. She's going to be overwhelmed. Cool. We rule her out. Gamma is also not for
  181. 17:51Mike. He's a talented designer. He can do his own deck presentation and he doesn't need Gamma to do that magic for
  182. 17:57him. He knows how to design a deck. So, how do you find in the middle something that feels like it resonates, right? And
  183. 18:03I just always find that really being able to create an accurate picture of that person in your head. So, for gamut,
  184. 18:09it might be educators. Here's a teacher. I think about the teachers that I know and I think about what their lives are like and I think about who they are and
  185. 18:15what their daily routines are and what what they do that's different than what I do and what their needs are and what kinds of presentations they might make.
  186. 18:22And then the more time you just really spend treating your audience like almost like you're in a novel or you're in a
  187. 18:28movie and you're putting yourself in the shoes of that character, then that allows you to really think, okay, how do
  188. 18:34I talk to them in a way that's going to matter to them, not necessarily matter to me. I feel like we've gotten really lucky with a few logos that like, you
  189. 18:40know, the exposure logo is just like a globe with a star in it. The perplexity logo is like a spinning door. And so
  190. 18:46like, how do I approach shaping logos and stuff? A lot of the times I'll try to push it into really far extremes
  191. 18:52first and then simplify simplify simplify and like weirdly a lot of the times like I'll just post it on Twitter
  192. 18:58and I'll be like has anyone seen this before? You know what I mean? And so a lot of the times the collective hive
  193. 19:04mind of Twitter or X or whatever you're calling it now is better than any design book or any kind of database I could
  194. 19:09check or something like that. Um but I always just try to make sure that our logos have like like a 10% strange thing
  195. 19:17about them. And I think that that is a really important part of the studio is that like I want to make sure that we're
  196. 19:22not creating just a classic geometric logo that everyone's seen a million times or something like that. And in this age or in this time, people are
  197. 19:30cranking out logos that look like flowers and the most like like three circles or something like that. And I'm
  198. 19:35like, what are we what are we even doing? Like that's not that's not ownable in any way. So I feel like just
  199. 19:41trying to get to the foundational parts of what why this company exists in the first place. We don't just create logos
  200. 19:48just to fill a space. That's never ever what we're doing. And so I think that as long as the logo can kind of tell a
  201. 19:55story and like convey an emotion or
  202. 20:00convey a strategy or something like that, that's when we know we're on to something. And so we'll create so so
  203. 20:07many logos when we're doing identity process, the going through the identity process. We'll create dozens of things
  204. 20:12that anyone else would be like, "Oh yeah, that works. That's perfect. Like that's fine. It fits. It's beautiful.
  205. 20:18But we always try to push it a little bit further to feel a little bit more interesting. Same with color. I was in a
  206. 20:23I was in a call one time with someone that was like, "Oh, I just eyropper things from Pinterest." And I was like, I like think about color in the deepest
  207. 20:30darkest way possible of like, can it work in light mode? Can it work in dark mode? Can we find panones for this
  208. 20:36thing? Uh just trying to be responsible with color is something that is really exciting to me and it's where it's where
  209. 20:42I find the most joy these days is like when two colors that maybe don't quite go together still create some sort of
  210. 20:49exciting thing or exciting vibration between them like that's really exciting to me. So yeah, I always spend a lot of
  211. 20:54time on on color and just making sure that you leave time to explore is a really important

  212. The Story Behind Smith & Diction

  213. 21:02thing. I grew up in New Jersey right outside of the city. Uh, but I grew up skateboarding, coming to the city to
  214. 21:08skateboard here. I grew up in the heydays of Love Park. So, a lot of really awesome skateboarders were hanging out there at that time. And so,
  215. 21:15I was just kind of obsessed with Philly from such a young age. I would draw the love sign over and over and over again
  216. 21:21on all of my notebooks and things in in school. And then in high school, I I had a really great art teacher. I had two
  217. 21:27really great art teachers that were like, "You really need to be focused on doing something with art." and that is
  218. 21:33something that I think that that you should be you really kind of hyperfocused on for college. And I was like, I think I'm going to go be a
  219. 21:38history teacher. And they were like, what if you just applied to one one art school just for us just to see how uh
  220. 21:45see how you like it. And then I did. I ended up going to an art school in Delaware. Quickly transferred out of
  221. 21:50that cuz I hated art school. I didn't really enjoy art school that much because I was commuting to this college.
  222. 21:56So I was driving an hour there, driving an hour back. And I got there and just
  223. 22:01like nobody took it seriously. So like everyone was like questioning the homework assignments or being like, "Oh,
  224. 22:07I didn't quite understand the homework, so I just didn't do it." And so I was like, "I'm working two jobs. I'm driving
  225. 22:14here. I'm commuting here." And I'm still getting the homework done. But you guys, for some reason, don't believe in this
  226. 22:20part of your career. And I think that car and I talk about this all the time of just like ever since I saw Photoshop
  227. 22:26for the first time and realized what you could make with it. I was like this is going to be the rest of my life and I have no backup plan. I have no other
  228. 22:33thing I want to do. This is exactly what I want to do. So when I was in art school I like a lot of people were still
  229. 22:40figuring out what they wanted to do. I would say most of them were still figuring out what they wanted to do and I just was like I don't want to be
  230. 22:45around this. and um went to a local university in South Jersey where I fell
  231. 22:50in love with print making. That's where I did a lot of like posters. I made a ton of posters, learned about setting type. I learned about etching prints and
  232. 22:57plates and things like that. So print is like deep deep inside of my DNA. And so
  233. 23:03I love to bring that print ethos into a lot of the things that I'm working on today. And I'm not so like focused on
  234. 23:09making the next best digital product. I'm focused on making something that someone want to hang on their walls. I
  235. 23:14was so obsessed with things like element skateboards and girl and chocolate and all that stuff. So, I was just like, how
  236. 23:21can I make a career doing that stuff? And that was what really excited me. And
  237. 23:27I also realized through skateboarding that like brand is so much more of an identity for people than a lot of people
  238. 23:34might think. Like, you know, if you're not skateboarding, you might be like, "Sure, I buy a special kind of soap, but
  239. 23:41that's not your identity." You know what I mean? But when you skateboard, you ride that deck and you can get sponsored
  240. 23:47by that company. So that company can pay you to have their board under your feet or their shoes on your feet. And it just
  241. 23:55became so much deeper of a obsession when you think about like design can
  242. 24:00actually be used as like a a proxy for your identity. Yeah. After college, I
  243. 24:06worked at an advertising agency in South Jersey. There I kind of just learned a lot of the basics of the programs. After
  244. 24:13that, I went to work at a place called 160 over 90, which is where I met Cara and she was my copywriting partner and I
  245. 24:19was the design side of it. So, we grew up in the brand design space completely
  246. 24:24united. We were together on every single thing that we worked on. So, we basically have one brain now of how we
  247. 24:31think about design and uh the approach to branding. After that, we both went to
  248. 24:36a place called Charity Water in New York City. And that's where we really focused on the idea of design can do really good
  249. 24:43things for the world. While working at Charity Water, you learned that design can change the world through its pure
  250. 24:50power to make people believe in a cause. When I went to work at Charity Water, the mission there is to kind of solves
  251. 24:57the world's water crisis. But their vision, the thing that's above that is to reinvent the idea of charity. You
  252. 25:03know, growing up, you always see like, oh, Charity doesn't have any money for design or it always kind of feels like
  253. 25:08it doesn't quite fit inside of this. It shouldn't look fancy. But working at Charity Water, we really focused on
  254. 25:14things feeling nice and feeling like, you know, uh, something that you should pay attention to. Utilizing design to
  255. 25:21draw attention to these really important things in the world was something that I was just so excited to be a part of. and
  256. 25:27we helped raise a few million dollars when we were there for clean water projects in Africa and all over the
  257. 25:32world. It was really awesome just to be around people who were excited about helping people cuz when I went there I
  258. 25:39was at a pretty low point in my design career where I was like is design just making millionaires more money and I if
  259. 25:46so I don't really want to be part of that. I left the agency world uh to focus on just can design be used for
  260. 25:52good and I believe it can and had a great time while I was there and and learned so so much. Scott Harrison is
  261. 25:58when you're around him, you just want to do well and you just want to um you know help solve the world's biggest problems
  262. 26:04and he makes you believe it's possible. And so I feel like I try to bring a little bit of that energy to our studio
  263. 26:09and to the work that we create where we're just like, "Yeah, sure. It's no problem. If you want to change the world a little bit, like we we'll help you try
  264. 26:15to do that as best we can." And we learned about writing a really good mission statement, having really good strategy, and also just like the impact
  265. 26:21that social media can have on people. We learned a lot of that stuff at Charity Water. And then after Charity Water, we
  266. 26:27looked around New York for a little bit. And we were like, "Okay, like what's our next step? What's our next move?" And I
  267. 26:32really just didn't want to work for anybody else ever again. And so we moved home and we're like, "All right, let's
  268. 26:38give this studio a shot. We'll see what happens. As long as I can pay my rent every month, well, this will be a great success." And 10 years later, here we
  269. 26:44are. So, uh, still paying rent, you know, still really excited about making stuff and, um, but yeah, so that's
  270. 26:52that's my whole life story. Mike is, um, honestly, it's wild. He's
  271. 26:58unlike most people. He's not he's not a regular person, you know, regular people
  272. 27:03like I wouldn't have started this company by myself. I think um, I'm lucky because I learned early on uh, the value
  273. 27:11of design, right? Like you can say a great headline, but if your great headline is just scribbled on a cardboard box, it doesn't have the same
  274. 27:17power as when it's when that design and the copyrightiting are really working together. And so it was never my idea to
  275. 27:23start the company. He like told me he wanted to start his own company on our first date. And I think I probably knew that even beforehand cuz we'd been
  276. 27:29working together for months already and we'd been working all day every day together. So I knew a lot about him even
  277. 27:34before we started dating. And it was 100% his vision. I was just like, "Cool.
  278. 27:39I love writing and I love um the creativity of it. So if that's your vision, I will be behind your vision
  279. 27:45100%. He's just refuses to let anything be mediocre and if it's not good enough,
  280. 27:51we won't present it. But I do also think that we are a little bit different than a lot of studios in you know the
  281. 27:56practical side. Like our team, we don't have a lot of meetings. We don't spend a lot of time on sil we don't have a lot
  282. 28:02of team building events. Like summer on our team, she lives in a different state. We see her maybe once or twice a year. We the our team our designers they
  283. 28:10come into work and they spend eight hours designing and then they go home. So because we get them to mostly focus
  284. 28:17on their craft and getting better at their craft instead of being in required team building events or doing time
  285. 28:23sheets or having HR conversation like none of that is a part of their days. We just really avoid all of the things that
  286. 28:29aren't mostly just design. We have one team meeting a day where everybody syncs up to make sure we're all on the same
  287. 28:35page. And then other than that, we mostly just let people do what they do. And I think that helps us make better
  288. 28:41work because the main thing that you do is actually work on the work instead of spending your day in meetings. Do you have a plan to scale your business? I
  289. 28:49mean, Mike is not scalable. No. In America, there is like a desperate culture of growth and you must make more
  290. 28:56money every year and you have to grow and you have to succeed and grow and grow and grow and like everything you make has to be bigger and better than it
  291. 29:02last. And we have to fight against that so hard, but really and truly our goal is never to be a big company. Like we
  292. 29:09want to be a small company where we are still doing the work every single day for as long as we have this company.
  293. 29:15We've always wanted to grow like a little bit because if we were a little maybe 10 people, we could have a little
  294. 29:21bit more capacity to do more projects at once and you know have a bigger team. But like you said, Mike isn't scalable.
  295. 29:28So we've we've already just with our team of five reached the point where if we grow much more then he will less and
  296. 29:35less be able to actually do the design. And so we're very very conscious of that. And we do not want to I mean part
  297. 29:41of the reason we started this company was so that he could be a designer. When you look at a traditional agency and
  298. 29:46your like career path, you go from being a designer to a senior designer to like an art director to like a creative
  299. 29:52director and very soon all you are is in meetings. All you are doing is giving creative direction and you never design
  300. 29:57anything. And Mike, that's part of why we started this company is cuz he just wants his title to be designer forever.
  301. 30:02He just wants to be making the designs. And so, so far we've been able to keep doing that where he is a lead designer
  302. 30:09on every single project. And that's really really how we want to keep it. We'll see if we're able to do that forever or not, but um that's the goal.
  303. 30:18How did I get to this point in my career is a really good example of just like
  304. 30:23not having a backup plan and just trying really really hard and failing like a lot. You know, that's something that I
  305. 30:29think is super super important for for people. It's like especially in this new age of AI, like you can have things spit
  306. 30:36out answers and things without even thinking about it. And to me, I'm just like, there's so much beauty in messing
  307. 30:43up and not being afraid to mess up. And I think that like skateboarding is the the ethos of that. Like you only land a
  308. 30:51trick once, but you try it 60 times. You fall in your face, you break your board, you you you have thrown your body down
  309. 30:59this set of stairs or off this ledge 20 times, and at the point you're like your your body's like, I can't take anymore.
  310. 31:06But then like you come really close to landing one and you're like all of a sudden that energy just comes right back
  311. 31:11up and you're like I'm going to try it one more time and then you land it and that's just it was all worth it. And so
  312. 31:18for design I'm just like not afraid to mess up and I'm not afraid to put out some stuff that maybe people don't like
  313. 31:24as long as I learned something about myself in the process. Like I said there's no backup plan. I'm doing this
  314. 31:30until I die. So, it's like why would I ever be scared of learning or be scared of failing when like this is it? I'm
  315. 31:37there's going of course there's going to be highs and there's going to be lows. So, why not just try it every single
  316. 31:43day? And I think that's the most important thing when people get scared of trying. That's when you fall into
  317. 31:50safety. That's when you fall into being like, "Oh, I just wish I could grab like these pieces and like collage them in a
  318. 31:56way, like do some scrapbooking." And I'm just like, "No, I want to reinvent the book." like almost every single time.
  319. 32:01Just that's that's the point. It's why we're doing this. It's like I don't I don't understand people that are just like I wish it was easier and I'm like
  320. 32:07why? Like I'm having so much more fun making the stuff. That's where I have that's where my heart feels the feelings
  321. 32:13of you know um you're inventing something. I guess you're creating something from scratch and there's
  322. 32:19nothing more beautiful than that.
  323. 32:26[Music]
Branding Masterclass for AI FoundersㅣSmith & Diction — Transcriptly