From Logica to Elysium
In part one, I was a second-year student with my first full-time offer, from a design agency in the United States. This is what happened next: the job, the decision to leave, and the studio I built instead.
Logica
The agency was called Logica. I got onboarded and started working with the team, on brands across the board: Spot AI, Unstuck, Quizard and many more. The work covered everything, from screens to product to marketing, UI and UX. I was in every domain at once, and I loved it.
What changed me was not the tools. It was the audience. I was designing things that hundreds of people would use, then thousands, then millions. Going from code to design was a steep curve and I learned faster there than I had anywhere before.
It was not easy. The two founders were in different places, one in the US and one in Morocco, and the time difference meant that when I was asleep, they were awake. Deadlines were real and the schedule was hectic. I kept at it, because I wanted to learn and I wanted to grow.
Leaving to build my own
As I kept sharing design work, people kept finding it. Inbound leads started arriving from around the world, and I had begun getting client work of my own.
Then my exams started, and I needed to prepare for them. Both things pointed the same way: I wanted to focus on building something that was mine, the thing I had wanted since my first year.
After around six to eight months with Logica, I stepped away and started Elysium.
Why Elysium
I named it Elysium, a Greek word for the perfect place of happiness. I wanted anyone who came to it, a founder with an idea or a team with a product, to feel they had arrived somewhere they were glad to be.
That sounds soft, but it’s a design brief. It means the process, the communication and the work itself should feel considered, and that the person on the other side should be able to relax. I bought the domain, and then I got to work.
What I took from it
- Wanting to grow beats being comfortable. The hectic hours at Logica taught me more than an easy job would have.
- Share your work even when you have a job. People found mine while I was working at an agency, and that’s what made leaving possible.
That’s where Elysium began. In part three: how the studio grew, and why we started building our own products.