Five designers. One studio. An endless stream of chaotic briefs, impossible clients, and creative catastrophes. Shot like The Office. Set in Melbourne.
Four immigrants who met in a Master’s of Communication Design program in Australia decided, against all better judgement, to open a studio together. What could go wrong?
Each episode follows the studio as they receive a new brief — always bizarre, sometimes impossible, occasionally insulting — and attempt to solve it while trying not to kill each other. Shot in mockumentary style with confessional cutaways, awkward silences, and the quiet devastation of a slowly closing laptop.
It’s a show about design. It’s a show about friendship. It’s a show about a man who spent twelve minutes explaining to a client why Comic Sans is never acceptable, and the client replied, “but my wife likes it.”
A luxury tea brand wants a rebrand that “feels artisanal but also modern and also like a meme”. Budget: $400. Timeline: Tuesday.
A local gym wants a website that’s “minimalist but very busy” and “feels premium but also free.” They have a logo made in PowerPoint. They love it.
A real estate startup wants a visual identity that feels both “corporate serious” and “fun and playful.” Tanisha has already opened Figma. Hei is already bored.
The client delivers their vision. The team listens. Jarred’s face says everything that no one will say out loud.
Ishaan proposes something wild. Tanisha asks what problem it solves. Hei has already started making things. George is encouraging everyone.
Something goes wrong. The timeline shifts. A fundamental creative disagreement surfaces. Jarred closes his laptop slowly.
Someone has a breakthrough (or gives up on the right principle). The team rallies. Tanisha updates the Notion database.
They present to the client. The client has notes. Cut to confessional. George is making a face. Roll credits.
Five designers. Five approaches. One studio that somehow keeps functioning despite all available evidence that it shouldn’t.
Jarred worked in a prestigious Sydney studio for over a decade before running his own practice. He joined The Bad Design Studio because Ishaan asked him to, and Jarred has been constitutionally incapable of saying no to Ishaan since the first week of their Master’s program.
He believes design is a discipline, not a mood. His philosophy is rooted in craft — the kind you can touch, feel, and hold up to a light source. He cares deeply about kerning, paper stock, corner radii, and whether a typeface choice is doing “actual work” or just “vibing.”
He came to Australia from Sri Lanka and carries the quiet precision of someone who read every Müller-Brockmann book twice. He has opinions about the Oxford comma that he will share unprompted.
Jarred communicates displeasure by slowly, deliberately closing his laptop — a gesture the rest of the team has learned to read as accurately as a weather forecast. When he does speak critically, it’s precise, quiet, and devastating.
He would never say a brief is bad in front of a client. The camera always catches his face instead. His facial expressions are the show.
He has a mechanical keyboard he is way too proud of. He describes it the way other people describe their children.
The moment Jarred opened a client’s Google Slides deck, made eye contact with the camera for four full seconds, and then closed his own laptop — even though the presentation wasn’t even on his screen.
Deep institutional blues. Warm cream. No gradients. Ever.
Ishaan started the studio because no one would hire him. He had no portfolio work that fit a standard brief, a brainstorming process that involved three whiteboards and a meditation timer, and ideas that were — depending on who you asked — either visionary or unemployable.
He is the youngest and the most technologically fluent. He’s the one who suggested using AI to generate client mood boards from audio descriptions. The concept worked. The execution was chaos. It was also kind of beautiful.
He grew up in Mumbai, came to Melbourne on scholarship, and has been treating every experience as raw material for a concept since he was seventeen.
Ishaan is the emotional glue of the studio. Everyone treats him as a beloved younger sibling — the godchild of the group. He listens to his elders (his friends). He respects their experience, genuinely, without being sycophantic about it.
He is always excited. Always. His energy in the morning is the same as his energy at midnight. His brainstorms are wild and often don’t work, but the ones that do are the episodes everyone shares.
He occasionally says something so controversial about design that the room goes quiet. He doesn’t notice. He’s already onto the next idea.
Ishaan once pitched a rebrand concept by playing a song and asking the client to “just feel the negative space.” Jarred’s laptop was closed within thirty seconds. The client loved it.
Unexpected combinations. Colours that shouldn’t work but do.
George has been designing since before most people his age cared about design. He’s worked across branding, editorial, motion, and digital — not because he was told to, but because he was curious. He has a specific, unmistakable visual language that clients refer back to years later.
He sees design as a conversation, not a declaration. He’s the one who can take Ishaan’s most unhinged concept and find the version of it that actually works — without losing what made it exciting. He is what Ishaan will become in five years, if Ishaan doesn’t burn out first.
He’s from Kerela, came to Melbourne to do the Master’s, and stayed because the coffee was too good to leave.
George is the one who keeps things light. He doesn’t stress — not performatively, but genuinely. He finds something interesting in every brief, even the awful ones. Especially the awful ones.
He has a sharp, dry sense of humour and his confessional segments are consistently the funniest moments of every episode. He always makes a face after the client leaves. The camera always catches it.
He is a mature version of Ishaan — passion with polish. He encourages everyone’s ideas and then finds a way to make the best one executable.
George’s confessional after a client described their brand as “Apple meets McDonald’s meets a farmers market” was twelve seconds long, completely wordless, and has been screenshotted over ten thousand times.
Warm, specific, distinctive. Instantly recognisable as his.
Tanisha came to design through problems, not aesthetics. She did an MBA, then a UX bootcamp, then three years at a product company doing design systems and user research. She learned to make things because she kept having ideas that no one would build, so she built them herself.
She uses the phrase “user pain point” in everyday life — including about her own feelings. She once told a friend that her anxiety was a “UX failure of the self.” She meant it literally.
She grew up in Goa, moved to Melbourne for the Master’s, and keeps a Notion database of everything — every client decision, every rationale, every time someone overrode her recommendation and why it went wrong. She shares this database with clients. Most clients are confused by it. She is confused that they are confused.
Tanisha keeps the studio on track. Without her, they’d have missed four deadlines in the first month. With her, they’ve only missed two, and both were documented.
She insists on user testing even for tiny projects. She once organised user testing for the studio’s own logo. She had five participants. She had a script. The results were statistically significant. The others looked at her the way you look at someone doing something both impressive and unnecessary.
She asks the right questions. This is both her greatest asset and her most reliable source of friction.
Tanisha tried to A/B test two versions of the studio’s lunch order. She had a hypothesis. She had a methodology. The others ate while she was still filling out the consent form.
Functional, structured, occasionally joyless. Always intentional.
Hei started making flyers for her older brother’s music events at sixteen. She learned Photoshop from YouTube tutorials, Illustrator from pirated software, and typography from staring at album covers for years. Academically, she came late to formal design education — but she arrived with a visual vocabulary that none of her classmates could replicate.
She has since built a cult following on Instagram for her maximalist poster work. She has ADHD. She is not the most social kind — not cold, but internal. She processes things through making. She will often produce three wildly different concepts before anyone else has opened a file.
She came to Melbourne from Hong Kong, and her work carries that tension between density and precision, between noise and control.
Hei is often the first one in the studio and the one still there after everyone else has gone home. Not because she works slow — she works fast, intensely, and then disappears into her own world for hours.
She shows up to critiques with work that no one asked for and somehow it’s always the most interesting thing in the room. She has a complicated relationship with briefs — she hears them, processes them, and then makes something adjacent and better. This drives Tanisha insane. It delights George. Jarred once quietly told her, in private, that one of her posters was the best thing he’d seen all year. She didn’t tell anyone. Neither did he.
Hei once delivered a full client presentation entirely in poster form — no slides, no words, just printed work taped to the wall. The client was baffled. The camera caught Jarred nodding slowly in the corner. It’s one of the show’s most beloved moments.
Dense, loud, layered. Maximalist with intent. Poster-born.