We hired our first full-time designer
After a year of project-based design work, we made our first full-time design hire. The decision process and what we were actually looking for.
For the first year of IMME, we ran design the way most early studios do: project-by-project, with a mix of founders doing product design and bringing in specialists for brand work or complex UI. It worked. But it had a ceiling.
The inflection point was when we were running three concurrent projects and each one needed design decisions made quickly, consistently, and with a coherent visual language. Switching context across three different brand systems is slow, and the quality showed it.
We weren't looking for a visual designer or a UI designer in the narrow sense. We wanted someone who thinks in systems, who sees the relationship between a component and the product it lives in, between a visual decision and the user behaviour it creates.
After a long search, we found exactly that. Our designer joined in May and has already reshaped how we approach new projects, running discovery and visual development in parallel rather than sequentially.
For other studios thinking about their first design hire: don't wait until you have the budget for someone perfect. Hire someone who can grow the role. The constraint will push everyone to better work.