Behind the Scope

In this episode, we sit down with Julia Weithaler, founder of To Be Honest, a Vienna-based design studio built entirely around working with purpose-driven, values-aligned clients. We get into what that actually looks like in practice, and whether it's realistic to think you can hold your values and keep your business alive at the same time.

We get into the gray areas, and discuss the industry's obsession with performing progressive values while doing none of the work. Imperfect action is still better than no action. But we get into where the line is.

Guest links:
Website: https://tobehonest.studio/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tbh.designstudio

No context. No curiosity about the brief, the client, the requirements, or what the person was actually trying to solve. Just a verdict stated as fact, and dressed up as professional opinion.

We've been watching this play out for a while. The way creatives pile on other creatives online. The way critique gets weaponized without any of the information that would make it useful. The way opinions get presented as objective truth by people who weren't in the room, didn't read the brief, and have no idea what they're looking at.

Lorenzo is the founder of Eat Butter First, and in this episode he gets into the messy, practical reality of building an agency that runs on freelance talent. How do you find the right people? How do you know when someone is actually a fit versus just available? And how do you budget for a team when every project looks different?

We get into all of it: the hiring mistakes, the relationship dynamics between agencies and freelancers, why passion and fit matter more than most people admit, and how to stay adaptable when you're operating in industries that move as fast as social media and hospitality.

Guest links:
Website: https://www.eatbutterfirst.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eat.butter.first/

There was a project that didn't fall apart because the client was difficult. It fell apart because I let them run it. The timeline, the process, the decisions, I handed all of it over without realizing what I was doing. By the end I wasn't a creative director anymore, I was just executing instructions.

In this episode, I get into exactly how that happened, what it cost me, and what I changed after. But also why this is bigger than one bad project. In a world where clients can type a prompt and get a result in seconds, the idea that creatives are just executors is becoming normalized. And every time we let a client take the wheel, we reinforce it.

Design used to mean something. Now it's a $5 Fiverr logo and an AI prompt away. So what the hell happened?

In this episode, we're getting into the uncomfortable truth about how digitalization and globalization were just the beginning of what we are seeing today with AI.

We're talking about how design went from a specialized craft to a commodity, why platforms like Fiverr and 99designs accelerated the race to the bottom.

We also get into the ethics of it all: the outsourcing, the exploitation, the "exposure" economy, and what it means for creatives trying to build a real business today.