How many calls end with no project?
A prospect describes what they want at midnight. You wake up to a brief, a price range, and whether it is worth a call.
The scoping, the brief and the price range are done before you open your laptop.
For your own business, or as a service you charge other businesses like yours for.
Nobody runs this lab yet. Take it, give it your hours and your prices, and it is yours.
WhatsApphome screen appEvery lab has its own page. That is the floor: these are what answers on top of it.
Studio Vasseur
online
A logo and four labels for an organic cider, noted. Three questions so the studio can answer you properly tomorrow morning. One: is there a date it has to exist for, a fair, a bottling? Two: four references now, or four now and more later, because that changes how the range is drawn. Three: do you have an existing logo to keep, adapt or bury? Answer here, even in three words, and you have a brief and a price range before nine.
11:42 pm
The job
A logo and a four label range for an organic cider producer. Ready for the spring fair, which sets the real deadline at 20 February, not the fair date itself: the bottles have to be labelled before they travel.
What they said, in their words
Two references, both hand drawn, no gradients. No existing logo to keep. Four references now, a fifth is likely next year and the range has to leave room for it.
Deliverables
| ItemItem | DetailDetail |
|---|---|
| Logo | One mark, horizontal and stacked, black and one colour |
| Labels | 4 front, 4 back, print ready, bleed included |
| Files | Vector source, PDF for the printer, PNG for the web |
| Rounds | Two rounds of corrections included |
What is not in the job
The website, the crate, and photography. Mentioned on the call, set aside here on purpose so the price means something.
What is missing to quote to the euro
The printer and the label material. Textured paper and a die cut shape change the artwork, not just the print bill. One question to the producer, before the range is drawn rather than after.
What they asked for, at 11:40pm
A logo and a label range for an organic cider producer, four references, ready for the spring fair. They mentioned two brands they like, both hand drawn, no gradients.
Worth a call
| SignalSignal | ReadingReading |
|---|---|
| Named a date | Real deadline, not a maybe |
| Cited references | Knows what they want |
| Four labels, not one | 2,800 to 3,500 euros |
They are awake and deciding tonight. A reply before 9am lands while it is still their project.
Three signals, one warning. He named a date, the spring fair. A named date is a real deadline, not a maybe. He cited two references, both hand drawn, which means he knows what he wants and you will not spend three rounds discovering it. And he asked for four labels, not one, which puts the job at 2 800 to 3 500 euros. The warning: he has not chosen a printer or a label material. Quote in a range and say what closes it, do not quote a single figure tonight. He was awake at 11:40pm writing about his labels. Call before nine and it is still his project. Call Thursday and he has asked two other studios. The full brief is attached, and the three questions he already answered are in it.
An independent designer loses days to discovery calls that go nowhere, and sometimes takes on a badly scoped job because the budget was never raised. The creative brief is meant to fix that, except it always arrives too late, after the call, when it still has to be written. An empty creative brief template does not help either: it waits to be filled in. This lab would take the description a prospect writes at the moment they write it, ask your own scoping questions, and hand back a brief, a price range and a view on whether it deserves a call.
Put there once, read by every magik.
Put there once by you, read by every magik, corrected when reality moves. Full on day one, unlike the collections below.
Worth more in month six than in week one.
The collections belong to the lab, not to any single magik. Every magik reads them and every run adds to them, which is why this lab is worth more in month six than in week one.
| Prospect | Need | Budget said | Worth a call |
|---|---|---|---|
| Restaurant opening | Full identity | does not know | yes |
| Online shop | Logo redesign | small | no |
| Private practice | Stationery and site | set | yes |
Invented for this page. Your Briefs collection starts empty and fills as you work.
It wears your name, not ours.
The same lab, under your name, your colours and your logo. Your customers never see ours.
AskMOJOOn the Pro plan, and not needed to take a lab. A fully bespoke theme exists as an upgrade, hand built rather than self-serve.
Gmail
NotionAnd whatever you already use: any tool available through an API or an MCP server, connected with your own account.
A tool built for exactly your job, and only that, will go deeper at that one job. This is for the jobs nothing covers, or the ones spread across three tools today.
Who it is for, what it has to achieve, what already exists, what is forbidden, the deadline and the budget. In this idea the prospect answers those in their own words, at midnight, and you get the filled version rather than a list of headings to chase.
Short enough that you read it before the call, which in practice means one page. What makes a brief long is unanswered questions turned into paragraphs. Here the open points are listed as open points, so the page stays the size of what is actually settled.
Filled. The template part is what you put in once, your scoping questions and your rates. What arrives in the morning is a brief about one specific job, with a range and a recommendation on whether it deserves a call. A blank template would leave the work exactly where it was.
A range, worked out from your rates and packages, never a signed quote. The range exists to rule out the projects that are out of budget on both sides. The quote itself is still what you send after reading the brief.
The scoping questions you put in are yours, and the lab picks the ones that apply to what the prospect describes. The questions that paid off on past jobs accumulate in a collection, so the scoping gets sharper over time rather than being fixed on day one.
With the criteria you write down: budget, deadline, kind of work, and what you never take on. It sorts and gives its reasons, you decide. The point is not to say no on your behalf, it is to have the brief and the range in front of you before you do.
Then the brief says so instead of guessing a figure. Often the person genuinely has no idea what this kind of work costs, which is why the range is shown: it lets them react to a number rather than invent one. If they still will not say, that is itself information.
Then the brief comes back mostly empty, and that is a useful result: it tells you the call will be a scoping call and priced as one. The magik asks in plain language and never fills a gap with an assumption, because an assumption in a brief becomes a revision later.
A tool built for exactly independent graphic designers, and only that, will go deeper at that one job. This lab is for the jobs no tool covers, or the ones spread across three tools today, and it runs under your name.
Every audience is still open.
Nobody has taken a square on this idea yet. You declare your audience when you take the lab (“roofers in Brittany”, “plumbers around Paris”), and two people can start from the same idea on two different audiences without getting in each other’s way.
And it wears your name, not ours.
The bundle describes a lab that does not exist yet : the jobs it would do, and an example of each output.
Open Knowledge Format : plain markdown, re-importable into any agent. No account, no lock-in.
You hear about a competitor's price change from your lab, not from a customer asking why you cost more.
Web search
Firecrawl
ExaGive it five things you wrote. Everything it writes after that sounds like you, instead of sounding like a chatbot.
What the AI Act actually asks of you, in plain words, taken from the text and not from a consultant's slide.
Web searchFirecrawlStill comparing tools? Best AI for writing.