I’m trying something new by sharing what’s happening in the studio while things are still in progress.
Some people call this “build in public.” I’m calling it Open Studio.
Lately, one way that’s been showing up is through my mentoring work with Daniela Herrera.
Daniela is originally from Peru and is currently studying to become a UX designer in France. She’s building a modern yearbook app that users can customize, and we’ve been treating it like a real project from the start.
From the beginning, I didn’t want this to feel like a classroom exercise or just another design critique. I wanted it to feel real.
That meant starting with strategy.
At the beginning, I asked her what she wanted to accomplish, and she had a lot of big ideas and goals. That made sense. Most people start there. But big goals can stay fuzzy for too long, so I had her turn them into SMART goals so we could make the project more realistic and workable step by step.
From there, we started building the foundation.
- We bought a domain name.
- We connected it to Cloudflare.
- I’m hosting the website on my cloud VPS.
- She wanted to learn WordPress and Elementor, so we’re using my Elementor Pro license so she can learn by doing on a real project.
We meet on Zoom every Monday and Friday.
Mondays are The Studio Brief. That’s where we set the intention for the week and decide what matters most right now.
Fridays are The Studio Walk. Daniela presents the work, we talk through her thinking, I give feedback, and then she goes back and iterates.
She speaks Spanish, French, and English, so I keep detailed notes from our sessions that she can revisit later. That part matters more than people think. Sometimes something doesn’t click in the moment. Then you come back to the notes later and can see the path a little more clearly.
What Open Studio means to me
For me, Open Studio isn’t just about showing finished work.
It’s about sharing the messy middle too. The part where you’re still figuring things out. The part where a project starts asking bigger questions than you expected.
Right now, Daniela is working through a login user flow and trying to think through how payments might work for her app. That’s where the project gets even more interesting. It moves beyond what it looks like and into how it actually works.
And that’s where a lot of real learning happens.
Mentorship, at least the way I like to do it, isn’t about hovering over someone and giving them all the answers. It’s more about structure, support, reflection, and giving someone enough room to build confidence through real work.
It’s exciting to see Daniela learn. I give her a few pointers, and then she figures things out.
This is my version of Open Studio: sharing the questions, the decisions, and the parts that are still taking shape.
