Two Lanes: Leading Creative Inside an Agency and Running My Own Studio

What the agency lane teaches

Inside an agency, I’m one part of a multidisciplinary machine. On a given engagement there are strategists, developers, marketers, and other specialists, and my job is to lead the creative and visual direction while the whole thing moves as one. That environment teaches things you can’t learn working alone.

It teaches collaboration at scale, how to lead the creative side while genuinely respecting what engineering, media, and strategy bring, and how to design in a way that serves the whole system rather than just my slice of it. It teaches enterprise-level thinking, because the projects are bigger and more interconnected, with real stakeholders and real business constraints. And it teaches the discipline of working within those constraints, compliance, procurement realities, established brands that have to evolve responsibly rather than be reinvented on a whim. When you’re one part of a larger effort, you learn to make creative decisions that hold up against pressures well beyond aesthetics.

The agency lane stretches me toward the systemic. It’s where I’ve learned to think about how my work connects to everything around it.

What the studio lane teaches

Through Eldritch Exchange, the dynamic flips. I’m often taking a project from an early idea all the way to a functioning experience, owning the creative direction, the design, and a lot of the execution, in direct partnership with the client. That teaches a different and equally valuable set of things.

It teaches independent ownership, the confidence and accountability of being the person responsible for the whole outcome. It teaches resourcefulness, because smaller budgets and leaner teams mean solving meaningful problems without a big machine behind you. It teaches versatility, because my studio work spans wildly different industries, and each one demands that I understand a new audience fast. And it teaches hands-on range, the willingness to move from strategy to design to front-end to the unglamorous technical work, whatever the project actually needs.

The studio lane keeps me close to the craft and the client. It’s where I stay sharp on execution and where I get to shape something highly personal from start to finish.

Why running both makes me better

The two lanes aren’t in competition. They feed each other. The systems thinking I’ve sharpened at the agency makes my studio work more scalable and strategic than a typical solo project. The hands-on range and ownership I keep exercising in the studio make me a more capable, more grounded creative lead inside the agency, because I’ve personally done the things I’m directing.

The through-line across both is the same, and it’s the thing I care about most. Whether I’m leading a slice of a large engagement or building an entire experience alone, I bring the same systems-oriented thinking, the same visual instinct, the same attention to detail, and the same conviction that design has to serve the user and the business, not just look good. The scale changes. The mindset doesn’t.

The takeaway

Neither lane is more important than the other, and I’d resist anyone who tried to rank them. The agency work shows I can lead sophisticated creative inside a complex, collaborative, constraint-heavy environment. The studio work shows I can independently shape and execute a personal brand or digital experience end to end. Together they show range, the ability to operate at different scales without losing the through-line that makes the work mine.

Running in both lanes isn’t a split focus. It’s two vantage points on the same craft, and each one keeps sharpening the other.