Are you an exec, or leader in product, engineer, or marketing? Or an individual with any non-design job title? Does your design team seem to think and talk about things different than you do? Well, that is THEIR problem, and WE’RE here to help YOU!
Why spend your time wondering where designers are coming from, or what they spend their time on, when you can hire us to just do what you want, fast. At the Dunning-Kruger Design Mockup Studio, we are experts in designing the way you think designing should be done!
If you read no further, then just know it’s right there in our name: we design mockups that look like what YOU want, and we ignore any and every other concern, concept, method, culture, system, research, theory, practice, or, like, whatever that other designers might care about.
How we work
The basics are simple—we deliver:
- Mockups
- Slide decks with mockups and stock photos
But it’s our unique approach that truly sets us apart. We can and will:
- Take your idea and turn it into a mockup
- Take your mockup and turn it into the exact same thing, but prettier
- Incorporate every bit of feedback into any mockup — ours, yours, your designers’, anyone’s!
But we don’t just incorporate your feedback! We go the extra mile to:
- Celebrate your ideas as something we’d never considered
- Skip detailed research and cherry-pick quotes that validate you
- Accept your invitations to argue with you within any framing you set, and then acknowledge that you’re right when you win the debate
- Use your words, anywhere you want them: in mockups, on slides, on mugs and t-shirts, in emails about the mockups
- Make it bigger
- Just put a button on it!™️
We of course are deeply experienced in making it pop and putting it above the fold. Not only we can zhuzh anything, we can and do zhuzh everything in a design!
Who are you, our client
We work primarily with C-level executives and leaders in product, engineering, and marketing. Our clientele includes:
- Executives who want to see mockups of their ideas
- Startup founders in their first “real job”
- Former engineers turned executives
- Former engineers turned product managers
- Former marketers turned product managers
- Former support staff turned product managers
- Former subject matter experts turned product managers
- Former and current project managers turned product managers
- Former Microsoft employees
- Engineering managers who didn’t used to have to work with designers
- Engineers who only build their own ideas
- Marketers who want to make sure ALL of their ideas are in there
- Sales people who just need someone, anyone to add one more feature to close the deal
- Opinionated relatives of executives
Our origin stories
There are many reasons we created Dunning-Kruger Design Mockup Studio — and so many of our former colleagues have inspired us over the years. But the original inspiration was a proposed “Cancel Delete” button.
It really starts as an archetypal story: a startup with a team of founders who formerly were engineers, program managers, and VPs at a bureaucratic megacorp. Their gut instincts guiding their key hires. The culture that you know is smart because everyone can argue even the tiniest details and then decide to agree with the CEO. The sense of urgency fueled by separate back-channel Sunday text threads with different execs, leading to multiple sets of secondhand verbal directives for the team on Monday morning.
And then as commonly happens in these stories, something is missing and another decision is needed. But now the designers are being all smarty pants and wanting to talk about how this might undermine the past decisions. NO! NO! NO! you probably are screaming…
And so were we, secretly. While we ourselves were all designers, we could see the writing on the wall. Literally: someone went up and wrote on the wall, “Cancel Delete.” And that was the choice: the team could trust the designers with their fancy schmancy relevant expertise to redesign a flow based on new requirements, or the team could keep coming up with defensive zero-sum arguments as if the requirements hadn’t just totally changed… OR we could just add a “Cancel Delete” button and get to the paid-for lunch before all the tacos were gone.
From that moment forward, we plotted to create a design studio where we’d never again be faced with that kind of choice where we’d miss the tacos. We would deliver the “Cancel Delete” solution every time, as fast as possible, and get those tacos!
We hope you will take this to heart and remember Dunning-Kruger! Without Dunning-Kruger, the world’s designers are just going to try to design, better and better — as if anyone hires designers for that! But with Dunning-Kruger, you can do the design without designers — and you can even do design without design! It’s that simple! It’s that fast!