Two designers, one client, three weeks in Medellín

The collaboration I was looking for turned out not to be with a developer, but with a copywriter from Beirut who arrived in El Poblado with a single backpack and a very good eye for what text should do next to a design.

I had posted the listing looking for someone who could write. He had found it while looking for exactly the kind of thing I was describing. We met for coffee before committing to anything. He was quiet, precise, funny in a dry way. His portfolio was excellent. We agreed to try a week and see.

The week became three weeks. We shipped the yoga studio rebrand faster than I had on any project where I was working with a remote team. Having someone in the same room who understood the brief as well as I did — who could look at a layout and say “the headline needs to do less work here” — was something I hadn’t experienced in years of remote work.

Medellín helped. El Poblado has this quality of productive ambiance — the kind of café culture where everyone seems to be working on something real and nobody is on a video call with their camera on making eye contact at the lens. We worked at the coworking space in the mornings and from a café in the afternoons. We ate arepas from the corner every day at around seven and talked through the work.

He taught me things about writing that I’ve applied to my design work since. I showed him how to think about visual hierarchy in a way that changed how he structures long copy. We each left with something the other had taught us, which was not in the brief but was probably the most valuable thing about the whole arrangement.

He posted the listing he found me through. I’m posting this story. If you’re a writer heading to Medellín and you want to work on something real, reach out.