Ten years ago, I walked into Twisted Toast convinced great design was about bold ideas and a strong creative vision. I was wrong, gloriously so. What I’ve learned since is that the true power in design lies in empathy, humility and listening.

On 1 September, I mark a decade with this remarkable agency. I started with hope and a fair amount of nervous energy, unaware of just how profoundly my view of design, business and life would shift. These lessons haven’t just shaped my work, they’ve changed me.

Listen first, then design

Empathy is arguably our species’ greatest advantage. At Twisted Toast, I’ve seen how the ability to understand and truly hear others changes everything. It reshapes not only our team dynamic, but how we partner with clients. When I meet a new client, I try to arrive empty, no assumptions, no preconceptions. I ask questions. I listen. I let their reality reshape my thinking. That’s when the work becomes meaningful.

Collaboration isn’t just a word here, it’s how we create. When a client challenges an idea, they’re not attacking my creativity. They’re helping uncover the best version of it. Even feedback that stings is often the start of something stronger.

Over time, I’ve realised that every interaction teaches you something. Even if you don’t see it right away, those lessons wait patiently until you need them most.

Trust is a team sport

In design, vulnerability is part of the deal. You’re constantly putting your ideas on display, and early on, I feared that exposure. I’d get stuck, avoiding the risk of being wrong. But then I reframed trust, not as a leap of faith, but as part of the process. Presenting work isn’t about showing off. It’s about opening a door to refinement. Clients and colleagues aren’t there to approve or reject, they’re there to build with you.

This mindset helped me take one of the biggest risks of my career. A few years in, my partner had a fantastic opportunity in Cape Town. I approached Kim and Louis with a radical (at the time) idea: Let me work remotely, full-time, from there.

They said yes.

Long before remote work became normal, Twisted Toast trusted me to make it work. That experience not only changed my life, it gave the agency a head start when the pandemic hit. While other teams scrambled to adapt, we had already proved that flexibility didn’t mean compromise. Great creative partnerships require trust. They thrive when people take calculated risks together, confident that the team will catch them if they fall.

Mistakes are inevitable, make them matter

There’s no such thing as a mistake-free creative career. The question isn’t whether you’ll make them, it’s how you handle them when they arrive. For me, every misstep became an audit. What went wrong? Why? What needs fixing? These moments of failure often led to our best improvements, tighter briefing processes, better feedback loops, smarter quality checks.

To quote Paula Scher: “To invent something, it requires this period of time, of trial and error, and making mistakes so you can make a discovery.” Mistakes aren’t just tolerated. They’re necessary.

But the real shift came when I saw mistakes as relationship-builders. If you own your error, listen to the impact and fix it properly, clients don’t just forgive. They trust you more. That accountability has helped build some of my strongest partnerships, professional and personal.

Stop debating “good design”

I’ve grown wary of words like “good,” “bad,” “pretty” or “ugly” when it comes to design. They’re vague. They end conversations instead of starting them. Early in my career, I found myself stuck in subjective feedback loops. “I don’t like the blue” tells me nothing. But “the blue feels too corporate for our family-friendly tone” is gold. It gives me something with which to work.

So now, I guide feedback using objective questions. Not “Do you like this layout?” but “Does it guide your eye to what matters?” Not “Is this colour scheme nice?” but “Does it reflect your brand values and appeal to your specific audience?”

This shift from opinion to purpose changed everything. Suddenly, design wasn’t personal, it was strategic. Critique became easier to give and to receive. The goal wasn’t “pretty” anymore, it was “effective.”

Even Comic Sans proves the point! Universally mocked, yet perfect in certain contexts. Typography isn’t good or bad, it’s either appropriate or not. Getting everyone to speak the same design language, one rooted in outcome, not opinion, makes the process smarter, faster and far more rewarding.

Change is constant, lean into it

I started in print, designing popular consumer magazine editorial layouts with Adobe InDesign and obsessing over typography. It was my world. Projects such as Poultry Bulletin still bring me back to that comfort zone. But the industry didn’t stay still.

Clients needed more… motion graphics, interactive web experiences, social media content. The medium expanded, and so did I. Twisted Toast gave me space to explore. I learned new tools, tested new ideas and discovered that the core principles of design, clarity, hierarchy, storytelling, still applied. They just looked different.

This mindset became our agency’s secret weapon when COVID-19 hit. Thanks to our early experiments with remote work (mine included), we didn’t miss a step. We kept delivering. We kept collaborating.

Adaptability is now non-negotiable. The tools will keep changing. The platforms will keep multiplying. The key is staying grounded in what matters. People, purpose, communication.

Work smarter, not longer

Like many designers, I once obsessed over every pixel. I’d tweak colours endlessly, nudge kerning by fractions, try every variation. Then I discovered something that changed how I work. It’s the law of diminishing returns. After a certain point, more effort doesn’t mean better outcomes, it just means slower delivery and higher costs.

Enter the Pareto Principle, which states that 80% of results come from 20% of the decisions. In a design context, that means the overall idea, the layout logic, the primary colour palette, those are the choices that matter most.

Now, I aim for clarity over complexity. I focus on the essentials, move quicker from idea to execution, and spend time where it actually moves the needle. Adobe Photoshop has hundreds of features. I use a few of them, well. That’s enough.

What really matters

Looking back, the biggest lesson of all is that values drive everything. At Twisted Toast, we’re not driven by ego. We’re driven by service. By doing work that works. By collaborating rather than competing. When potential clients ask what makes us different, it’s not our tools or our tactics. It’s our culture of respectful inter-relationships with clients, trust, adaptability, curiosity and care. We’re not a vendor, we’re a partner. We grow with our clients, learn from our mistakes and build systems that last.

What excites me most about the next ten years is that these values won’t change. The media might. The technology definitely will. But if we stay curious, collaborative and committed to solving real problems, we’ll thrive.

That’s what Twisted Toast taught me.

And that’s the kind of work I want to keep doing.