My advice to young designers has always been: start at an agency. You get breadth, exposure to different industries, a pace that forces you to think on your feet. The best designers I know honed their craft in these forges, at shops exactly like the one Madison Utendahl built.
Madison Utendahl, writing for It’s Nice That, describes shutting down Utendahl Creative—ten people, all women, Brooklyn, every award possible—not because it failed, but because she saw the model underneath it was broken:
Lower fees mean you need more clients to hit the same revenue. More clients means more pitching, more account management, more context-switching. Your team burns out. Quality slips. And those “portfolio piece” clients? They expect the same level of work as your premium clients, but you’re doing it on a shoestring. You can’t win.
She watched agencies with triple her headcount bidding on $80K projects that should have been $250K. Not because they wanted to. Because their fixed costs gave them no choice.
Then AI accelerated the timeline:
Clients are using AI. They’re running their first drafts through ChatGPT before they even send the brief. They’re generating moodboards with Midjourney. They’re asking why your junior copywriter costs $8,000 when they’ve already got a version they generated in ten minutes.
Utendahl again:
If your business model depends on clients not noticing that the landscape has shifted, you’re already dead. You’re just still moving.
The industry data backs her up. 73% of teams adopting AI agents have already cut agency content creation spending. 91% of senior agency leaders expect AI to reduce headcounts, and 57% have paused entry-level hiring. Small agencies are rebounding while medium and large agencies contracted for the first time on record. The Omnicom-IPG mega-merger eliminated roughly 4,000 positions and retired legacy networks FCB, MullenLowe, and DDB. The middle is hollowing out.
Utendahl’s proposed replacement is the collective: independent contractors collaborating per-project, no shared overhead, honest pricing. I get the appeal. Collectives strip away the margin squeeze, the back-hiring trap, the lease signed in 2019.
But agencies had real value that collectives don’t automatically replicate. Multiple layers of eyes on work—account director, creative director, designer, production—meant bad ideas got caught before they shipped. Four or five layers was probably too many. But zero layers of structured oversight is the other extreme. A lot of freelance collectives end up there: talented people producing work with nobody checking the brief against the output.
The part that nags at me: does my “agencies first” career advice still hold? The shop where a 23-year-old designer learned to take feedback, iterate under pressure, and watch strategy translate to execution—if that shop is closing, what replaces it? Collectives are great for experienced practitioners. They’re terrible at developing junior talent, because nobody in a collective has the margin or the mandate to train someone who isn’t yet pulling their weight.
If the model has indeed broken, the replacement that develops the next generation has yet to be imagined.
