Judgment under incomplete information.

Creative direction is leadership. These stories are decisions, tradeoffs, and course corrections — not a highlight reel.

Building an agency that kept clients for fourteen years

Situation

Founded Majorminor in 2009 with studios in San Francisco and Los Angeles, competing for clients against agencies many times its size.

Decision

Stayed lean on purpose. Projects ran with small senior teams (3–6), not a padded junior bench. Turned down work that needed headcount more than judgment. Kept client relationships owned directly — not handed to account management. The bet: depth beats scale. The experience of working with the studio had to match the quality of the work, or neither would last.

Outcome

Client relationships routinely ran six to ten years (ICA 2013–present, GPTW 2015–2023) — repeat, deepening engagements rather than one-off projects.

Stewarding a global brand for eight years

Situation

In 2016, Great Place to Work pivoted from a recognition/PR product to a data-driven culture consultancy. Its existing identity — built for an annual list announcement — couldn't carry a subscription analytics business, and the certification badge was about to become a distributed asset displayed by thousands of client companies.

Decision

Chose governance over visual novelty. Resisted pressure to make the mark more distinctive for its own sake. A badge worn by 10,000+ other companies has to stay legible across a licensee network — not perform personality. The creative call looked conservative. It was the harder one.

Outcome

The certification badge system is still in use today across 10,000+ companies in 60 countries — eight consecutive years of renewals as external design leadership.

Directing a team on a mission-driven rebrand

Situation

Firebrand — a wood-fired Oakland bakery whose workforce is 80% formerly incarcerated or formerly homeless — had product quality and mission both exceptional, but a brand that communicated neither, just as it began scaling toward wholesale distribution.

Decision

Directed a six-person multidisciplinary team — two designers, a producer/photographer, a project manager, and a copywriter — across strategy, design, production, and copy, while owning the client relationship with Firebrand's leadership directly for the full six-year engagement.

Outcome

The identity system carried the brand through wholesale expansion, a second production facility, a flagship cafe, and national press — running the length of the company's highest-growth years.

Reflection

Directing the team meant protecting one decision: craft and mission as a single experience. Every discipline on the roster existed to make that decision harder to dilute.

Running a team, not a one-person studio

Situation

[REBUILT July 27, 2026 — replaces invalidated premise, ledger #19] Across Majorminor's later years, projects were staffed by a consistent core team rather than solo work: Rob as creative director, Vince W producing, Michelle managing projects, and TK on copy.

Decision

[NEEDS ROB] How was this team actually run? Critique cadence, how work got divided between strategy and execution, how disagreements got resolved — this is the one section that needs Rob's voice directly, not an inference from file records.

Outcome

[NEEDS ROB] What did this team produce or become, together, that a solo practice couldn't have?

See the work those decisions made visible.

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