Senior Designer Samantha Warren asked me to write content for a site she would be designing to showcase the Phase2 Design team. They wanted something that visually captured a particular aesthetic, and they wanted to describe how they think about design to potential clients who might be reading the site.

I sat down and talked with Samantha, Laura Schoppa, and Joel Sackett one day in a conference room that overlooks the Potomac. They were like kids in a candy store when I asked them to tell me what it feels like to design or how they envision the perfect client comp review to unfold. I encouraged them to (at least temporarily) ignore the habit of describing the day-to-day expectations of design (both from a client and a team perspective) and, instead, to explore the deeper, “how do you think about design?”

They got past the “our process” and “our deliverables” themes — which are important, of course, but also redundant to most every other typical web agency’s website — and started with the meaning.

The end result are tidbits of info that Samantha and her team were stoked to use as the foundation upon which they created a design — but the full experience of Phase2DesignStudio is truly heartwarming. Check it out!