A Gut Feeling on the First Call: A Conversation with Péter Serfőző

No. I trained as a civil engineer at the Technical University — my father was an engineer, I had good German and English, and at eighteen I had no idea what else to do. But two things came out of that. One, I probably already had a structured way of thinking, from how I was raised, and the engineering degree reinforced it. And two, university in those days had the best internet in the country, and a lot of free time. So I started messing about with Flash and building Flash websites. This is around the turn of the millennium.

Word got round the dorm that I could make these things, and I built a site for a pizzeria, and a little network formed around me. The funny thing is I still have clients today that trace back to those dorm connections. From Flash it went to "well, we also need a poster," so I tried posters — terrible ones, by today's standards. But that's how the client base grew, and sometimes I even got paid. By the pizzeria, in pizza. It was a romantic world.

A schoolfriend had been hired by Disney on the strength of the same Flash-and-banners work we'd been doing together. He said they were looking for more designers. I applied — I had the languages, I knew Flash, and that was enough. This was the Budapest Disney office just starting up, maintaining the European websites, both the IT and the content side. We were in the content factory: producers above us, and we localised newsletters and banners into sixteen languages. Production work.

I was there five or six years, and the whole time I was quietly building my own career alongside it — keeping the freelance clients going in parallel. Eventually the freelance load got so heavy that it outgrew the job, and I left to found Zwoelf. That's 2009.

From the number twelve. I was born on the twelfth, I was the substitute keeper wearing twelve, I got my driving licence on the twelfth. Twelve always came up. It's not a textbook name — impossible to pronounce, really — but people remember it. "That yellow company with the unpronounceable name." So on some level it works.

I rented an office straight away — I didn't want to work from home. Sat there alone, then six months later the first designer joined, then another, then another. At the top we were maybe ten designers. It was never a classic agency, more of a studio. And here's the thing that connects to what you're asking about: it worked best while every designer was effectively working for me, and I was the one presenting. I was the project manager, the client relationship, all of it.

Because it's a question of who the client believes. And this is still true today — it's maybe the most persistent problem in the whole business. If I say something, the client accepts it. If my colleague says exactly the same thing, they don't.

Still live. It's client-dependent. Some clients say, "Peti, if you tell me this person is the one for it, then they're the one, done." Others say they accept it, and don't. That's the psychological game of it. And some are genuinely disappointed that they're not working directly with me. You have to manage that.

I've thought about that. Whether to launch a partnership, a new brand with someone, to get away from it. But building a whole new brand from scratch is hell. Easier to reposition the one you have.

Honestly, I've only figured myself out since. The urge to make was always there — the medium almost didn't matter. I'm a maker, not an operator. I create something, and the ideal is that someone else takes it forward. That's rarely been available to me.

Here's a good example. I used to make music with a tracker — we're a different generation, but there were these demo parties in the nineties, everyone hauled their computer in, plugged them together, and there were teams: programmers, a graphic person, a musician. I was the musician. And then I realised that when I'd finished a track — a genuinely bad track — and burned it to CD, the thing I actually enjoyed was designing the cover. Choosing the type. Choosing terrible fonts, but choosing them. That was the making. If not this, I'd have been an actor — I still do improv, and I love producing myself like that. Same instinct.

That's the client's problem, though. That's exactly where it gets difficult.

The whole thing is hard. But let me turn the question slightly: what's hard is different with every client. The hardest part is figuring them out when you get relatively little communication with them. If I could sit down and have a beer with every client one evening, then — without any deep psychological training — I'd be able to place them. What matters to them, what motivates them, what interests they're serving, what other interests they're trying to satisfy. If you can see those, the obstacles are relatively easy to get through. If you misread them, everything can go badly wrong.

Yes. You need to profile everyone, in a sense. Take an identity project — there's groundwork, strategy, and those parts are never the problem. The problem comes when we reach the visual stage. Say there's a client whose fixation is how the business card looks. If you sense that's in their head, and you get the business card right, they'll accept everything else. It's not plucked from the air — there really are these triggers, and if you can click the right one, from that point on you're fine.

Trust. The whole thing is one enormous question of trust — seasoned with the fact that the client pays, so in theory there's a hierarchy, a superior-and-subordinate dynamic. And the moment that shows up, it does the process no good at all.

We have a lovely client right now — from minute zero there was nothing to decode, because they're completely natural, honest, they tell you everything. And that's the point. It's not that other clients lie — it's that certain clients take on a role, and part of that role is not talking about certain things, or not giving feedback immediately, because they feel it would offend you. When the best thing would be to say it at minute zero, in the pricing conversation. Not to hold it back and produce it later at a convenient moment. Transparency, honesty, a kind of empathy for the fact that we're working together — when that's there, it's an enormous help. Then they accept what I say, I accept what they say, and a much better result comes out. We talk about this internally, when we do project retros: it's the lack of honesty that leads to problem after problem.

I believe so. I can't think of a case where it went wrong once everything was on the table. The reverse I can name instantly — where it's a bit like a relationship, someone swallows something, "fine, I'll let that go," and then the nail works its way out and the project's over.

And sometimes the real feedback never reaches you in the room at all. It comes through a side channel — a quieter voice in the client's organisation who tells you, outside the meetings, what's actually being thought. When that happens, it tells you something about the power dynamics on their side: that the people in the meeting aren't able to say what they really mean while they're in it. It's useful information, but it's also a warning sign.

It's a gut feeling. I get a gut feeling about a client immediately — on the first meeting. It usually lands, not always. That there might be trouble. And then we try to decode it. And unfortunately these feelings come true, and eventually the nail works its way out from under the carpet.

And here's the interesting part. One of the senior designers I work with doesn't have that same first-instinct read, because he's in fewer of those early conversations. But during the process he has a very serious feeler. He helps enormously with the thing we talked about earlier — working out what actually matters to this client, and then sharpening the presentation, shifting the emphasis, so acceptance comes more easily. The two things are different skills: the read you get on the first call, and the read you get while the work is moving. A studio benefits from having both in the room.

They agree completely with the brief. And then, often, at the end they want to go directly against the brief, because they like something else. There's a subjective problem baked in: we're trying to position something — against competitors, in style, in price — and that has visual consequences and messages, and it's well argued, and then subjectivity walks in. But that's not even what I want to stress.

What happens a lot is you have to make them understand not to work against their own brand for subjective reasons. If they want success, a strong professional line, they need to go where we're pointing. There's room to play — but if they want to change it totally, then, well, we shrug and we do it for the money.

On the last project that fell through, we ran at it three times. That's the financial pressure again — you talk to the team, "guys, this is how it is, we need the money, let's do it," because their motivation drops as it turns into iteration, into total dismantling, merging versions. Though, in fairness, sometimes the genuinely good things come out of exactly that.

The ideal is that the direction is right on the first attempt and you just refine it. When it's not, you have to start digging — what didn't come out in the moodboards, what didn't surface. On one project, for instance, it turned out a family member was an art teacher, and at Sunday lunch they'd sketched out on paper how they thought it should look. And things like that surface late.

It's very awkward. You thank them, make a version of it, and show what the challenges with it are, what isn't right. This was an analytical client, so we showed them these are the options, changed this way it could still work. Some clients would tell you to get lost, of course — we don't deal with that. But this comes back to having to pay the subcontractors. If money weren't in play, I think you could push back much harder. Though maybe if I pushed back, it'd end anyway. We've had projects where we did push back.

And one more thing — it can tip so far into a money job that it becomes professionally indefensible. That's rare, fully indefensible. But Zsolt Czakó always used to say: compromise kills design. When it's good for you and good for them, you get a mongrel. Something has to stand up, has to say something, and it may not suit everyone — but if you look at the communication goal, there can't be compromises, because it's the same as speaking to everyone: speak to everyone and you speak to no one. What usually happens is the edge goes. The thing that was the core gets cut out. It's professionally passable — it looks fine, the type is good — but the soul's been cut out of it exactly.

If someone's narcissistic or full of themselves — that comes through fast, from picking up the phone mid-conversation without a word. There were clients like that who weren't necessarily bad afterwards — some people just have a very strange style, roll over everything, and yet you can work with them.

There's one thing that isn't about the person and yet tells you a lot: who referred them. That alone is huge information. It's a spiral — good clients bring good clients. It's very rare, I can't think of a case, where a good client refers us to a jerk. A bad client won't refer us to a bad client either — but somehow you have to catch the good ones.

They definitely underprice themselves. I mentor people, and I'm always pushing them to go higher — and even then there's still room to come down. The way the haggling usually goes is at most they name a budget, "this is what we have." And we have a contact form on the site where you can already pick a category — under a million, one to three, three to five, above five. Revealingly, the person who clicks "under a million" clearly has no idea what things actually cost. Someone who picks three-to-five, or above five, genuinely knows.

What I believe in is this. We've built the brand foundations for a lot of companies — vision, mission, values, personality. We know all of it. If we can give the AI that context — or better, if we don't hand it over but generate for them ourselves, as experts who know their brand — then it's not slop that comes out. Short prompts, good results, and maybe a designer nudges it for three minutes and it's done. And you say: this has a monthly fee.

If they want to, they do it. If they want us, we do it. Hand it over, it's a one-off cost; keep it with us, we run it. It's a bit like when Photoshop arrived. Before, people cut posters together with Letraset, by hand, mocked things up, set type by hand — and then desktop publishing came, and the computer and the software sped it up. Now you're doing the same, except you're not even doing it yourself — you're conducting it. Watching it. You can ask for a hundred versions in the time of one, pick one, take it into Figma, adjust a thing or two, add the human touch — it's supposedly already on-brand, but that human touch still goes on.

It doesn't go that cleanly. It comes out through the decision mechanisms — I'm at the presentation, I say a few words, and often it's, "yes, yes, Péter, what do you think," when my colleague has just said something. And I back them, obviously, I can't say anything else, nor would I. Plus there's the promise we keep — that I'm in the whole project, just in the background, not client-facing. Some clients don't need me at the presentation, and there's no problem. Others, I have to be sitting there for them to believe it, or I present myself. And then the success rate is higher.

For a while I thought I was imagining it, thinking too much of myself. But unfortunately it proved true — that's just how people work. They see me, they read my book, so of course when they come to the company they know I can't be on every project — that was said outright, up until last year, that I don't effectively do the project myself.

Good question. You've got me there.

The certain one: talk about price far too late. While I was less experienced I dragged it out, delayed it, avoided even raising the price if I could. I think that's a senior skill in itself — being able to talk about price, knowing how to talk about it, knowing it's not a necessary evil.

It was a joy. I'm curious where you land with this, whether I get some of that mental manna back to refine things with. Because we're always striving for it to be good.