Why every project should start with a workshop.
The best logos, websites and campaigns are never the first thing we make. They're the last.
Before any of it there's a conversation that needs to happen about what the business actually is, who it's talking to, what it's trying to do and why it hasn't done it yet. That conversation doesn't happen naturally in a brief document or a first call. It needs space, the right questions, and enough time to get past the surface and into the thing underneath. That's what a workshop is for. Not to produce a deliverable, but to make everything that follows worth making.
What a good workshop really buys you isn't a strategy document or a mood board or a set of decisions. It's clarity.
Those things can all come out of it, but clarity is the real prize, and it only comes from sitting with someone for a few hours, mapping out where they are and where they want to be, and being honest about the gap between the two. Some of the most useful moments happen in the middle of that process, when something gets named that had never been named before. A positioning problem that had been dressed up as a design problem. A founder who'd never had to explain what they do to a stranger and discovers, in doing so, exactly what makes it worth explaining.
I start most projects with a workshop because it changes the quality of everything that comes after. The design brief is sharper. The strategy has a foundation rather than a guess. And the client is involved from the beginning, not handed something at the end and asked to approve it. That's a different kind of working relationship. Slower at the start, faster everywhere else, and far more likely to produce something that actually does what it's supposed to do.