The questions we get asked, answered without the sales part

AI startups between pre-seed and Series A, usually two to fifteen people with technical founders and no designer, and growing technology companies between five and fifty people whose presentation has fallen behind the business. Roughly sixty percent of the work is the first group.

When you need design output every week — that is a subscription studio or a hire. When you are pre-product and still changing what you sell monthly. When the decision involves five or more people, because fixed timelines do not survive committees. And when you need naming with trademark clearance or multi-market rollout, which is agency scope.

Most clients are in the US, UK and Europe, with work across the GCC. The studio runs from Cairo with presence in Wroclaw and Oman, remote and asynchronous. Timezone has not been a constraint for a while.

Usually very little. Enough that the product does not look abandoned, and nothing more. The exception is raising on a story rather than traction, where the deck and the site are effectively the product an investor is evaluating.

There is no rate card. Each engagement has a published floor: brand sprint from $3,000, web sprint from $2,000, product design from $3,000, UX audit from $1,500. The number moves with scope, and every service page lists exactly what moves it.

Because making a founder sit through a discovery call to hear a number wastes their time and ours. If the floor is above your budget you should know that in ten seconds, not after two calls.

Scope, never hours. Sub-brands, collateral, motion, page count, the number of user roles, whether a CMS is needed, and whether copy is written from scratch. A rush that reorders someone else's booked work also costs money; a normal two-week turnaround does not.

No. Fixed scope, fixed price, agreed before the work starts. Hourly billing makes the client pay for the designer's learning curve and quietly penalises anyone who works fast, which is the opposite of what a sprint is for.

Not by default. Plenty of clients do one sprint and never come back, which is the model working as intended. If you need continuous output, a subscription studio or a hire is a better fit and costs less over a year.

Split across the engagement, agreed in the one-page proposal before anything starts. No hidden line items appear later — anything outside the agreed scope is quoted as an add-on before it is done.

Figma links and a Notion page, never a zip of raw files. For a brand sprint: logo system, typography, colour, guidelines and applications. For a web sprint: a live site on your domain. For product design: flows, states and a design system. For an audit: ranked findings with annotated screens.

There is no round count. The scope is fixed instead, which is the honest version of the same idea — you give feedback until the work is right within the agreed scope. What is not included is new scope arriving as feedback.

Yes, when it is in scope. Headlines, section hierarchy and positioning. Most founders think they have copy and actually have a list of features, and designing around a feature list produces a page nobody finishes reading.

We build marketing sites, in Framer by default and Webflow when you already run it. We do not build applications — for product work we hand off to your engineers with states, tokens and edge cases documented.

Omar, the senior designer who runs the studio. There is no account manager and no junior team. Specialists are brought in when a scope genuinely needs one — motion, illustration, front-end — and you are told when that happens.

Scope is fixed on day one. Progress lands in the file at least every two days, replies come within four business hours during an active sprint, and there are two meetings: kickoff and handoff. Everything else is asynchronous.

One decision-maker who can give feedback within a day, whatever brand or product material already exists, and access to someone who talks to your customers. You do not need to describe what you want visually — that is the part we are for.

The delivery date moves by the same amount and we tell you immediately rather than at the end. Most sprints that slip, slip on feedback rather than on design.

Yes, and we are direct about it. AI removes waiting — exploration, iteration, production. The decisions are made by a person. Generated design converges because the tools optimise for a plausible result, and plausible is an average, so the judgement is the part worth paying for.

The studio takes one or two engagements at a time, so it depends on the week. When we are full you get a specific start date rather than a maybe, and the option to take it or not.

It is when the scope is fixed and one senior designer does the work. Most of a three-month agency schedule is coordination, handoffs and waiting for the next scheduled call. We compress the waiting, not the thinking.

That is the normal case — Product Hunt, demo day, a funding announcement. Bring the date to the first call and we will tell you whether it is real before you commit, rather than discovering it in week two.

You do. Source files and full rights transfer at the end, including the project file for a website. Guidelines are written for your next designer, developer or agency to work from — if your team can use the brand without calling us, the handoff worked.

Yes. Send yours, or we can work from a simple mutual one.

Yes, and it costs nothing. Say so before we start and the work stays private.

Elevate Studio LLC, registered in New Mexico, USA, operating from Cairo, Egypt. Invoicing is in USD.