I started a design agency with no clients, no capital, and a name I picked because I liked the colour green. A year later, I understand what I was actually trying to build — and it's not what I thought.
Greene Studios started as a lie I told myself to feel more legitimate.
I was freelancing — taking whatever Figma gig I could find on Twitter, designing logos for ₦15,000, doing landing page redesigns for clients who would spend three weeks in feedback loops and then disappear without paying. It worked. Kind of. But it felt shapeless. I had skills, I had clients, but I didn't have anything I could point to and say: this is what I do.
So I created a brand. I named it Greene Studios, registered an email address, built a one-page website, and started telling clients they were working with a studio rather than a freelancer. The work was identical. But something shifted — in how clients treated me, in what they were willing to pay, and in how I thought about what I was doing.
I get asked about the name often. The honest answer: I like the colour green. It feels calm, ambitious, and alive at the same time. I wanted a name that felt like a place where interesting work happened — a studio, not a service.
The "e" at the end is deliberate. It makes it look older, more established. Like something that's been around long enough to have developed a house style.
Almost everything, in sequence:
Hourly pricing is a trap for creative work. It punishes speed and rewards inefficiency. A designer who delivers a polished identity in 8 hours is worth more than one who takes 40 hours to reach the same result — but hourly billing has that exactly backwards. I switched to project-based pricing after three months and immediately started making more money with fewer clients.
Good work is necessary but not sufficient. The design industry is full of incredibly talented people doing work nobody knows about. Distribution is a skill, and I had to learn it the hard way. I spent six months building a portfolio that three people saw.
There was a period where I had more clients than I could handle, was constantly exhausted, and was producing work I wasn't proud of. That's not running a studio. That's running a sweatshop with one employee.
"A studio has a point of view. A service provider delivers outputs. I had to decide which one I wanted to be."
After a year of making mistakes and correcting them, I've arrived at a clearer sense of what the studio is for:
Greene Studios exists to help ambitious internet products look and feel as good as they actually are. Most founders build something genuinely interesting and then present it to the world in a way that undersells it completely. Bad typography. Generic colour palettes. Visual hierarchy that communicates nothing. I fix that.
Specifically, I work with startups and founders in their first 18 months — when the product is still being defined, when the brand is still malleable, and when the visual decisions being made will compound for years. That's the moment where design has the most leverage, and it's where I do my best work.
Something I didn't anticipate when I started the studio: being a full-stack engineer makes me a significantly better designer. When you understand how constraints compound across a system — how a design decision on a component level ripples into performance, accessibility, and maintenance cost — you make different choices.
Greene Studios now offers implementation, not just design. I don't hand clients a Figma file and wish them luck. I build. That changes the nature of the relationship entirely, and it changes what "good design" means — it has to work in production, not just in a prototype.
I'm not trying to build a large agency. I'm not interested in managing a team of ten designers and spending my days in project management software. What I want is a small, selective operation with a distinctive point of view that produces a small number of exceptional things per year.
The model I aspire to is closer to an architect's practice than a design agency. The architect doesn't just hand you blueprints. They think deeply about how you'll inhabit a space, advocate for decisions that serve you in ways you didn't know to ask for, and take responsibility for the final result.
That's what Greene Studios is becoming.
I take on a small number of brand and product projects each quarter.