Series open · opened on 14 January 2026

The brief and the machine

We opened this series in January 2026 after a run of agency interviews in which the same sentence kept coming back: nobody is quite sure any more when the work begins. The six texts gathered here follow a creative commission from the client's call through to the invoice.

Texts in this series

What is left of the brief

In eleven agencies, the first proposal now lands before the scoping meeting. Commissioned work has been displaced by this, not abolished.

Rania Bouabdallah
2 min

The mockup is no longer the deliverable

Six interface design studios reorganised their production in eighteen months. What they sell today has more to do with decisions than with files.

Rania Bouabdallah
1 min

Who decides what counts as a good idea

Aesthetic judgement used to be spread across the studio. It is concentrating. A look at a hierarchy reforming from the top down.

Rania Bouabdallah
1 min