The Red Five Studio™
The classroom that works like an agency■
From Week 5, assignments stop being assignments. They arrive as client requests — with briefs, budgets, timelines, revision requests and sometimes, difficult feedback that you must navigate. It’s the closest thing to a real job you can get before you have one.
The Idea
Schools teach design■ We train designers■
You can learn colour theory anywhere. What no tutorial, degree or diploma gives you is the experience of being a working designer: reading a real brief, managing a real deadline, absorbing real feedback, and presenting work to someone who can say no. That experience is what builds professional judgment — the thing you’re actually here to buy. The Studio manufactures it — before your career depends on it.
How It Works
A job in the Studio■
A client email, like the ones agencies get: goals, budget, deadline, and things left unsaid that you’ll have to ask about.
Scope it, question it, design it, on the clock.
Revision requests, pushback, changed minds, and the occasional difficult client. Handling it IS the lesson.
Live, to the room, the way you will to paying clients. Critique in every class.
What You Build
What the Studio trains■
Your Creative Director
The Studio is run by Michael Marsland-Root — agency owner, university instructor, over 20 years in the industry. He plays your creative director and your clients: briefing you, pushing back, approving the work. You’re not practicing on hypotheticals; you’re apprenticing under someone who has answered to real clients for over 20 years.
Meet Your Mentor →
The Capstone
It ends the way real work ends — in front of the client■
Your capstone project is presented and defended at the Studio Review before a live panel, exactly as you would to a paying client. You leave with the work, the case study for your portfolio, and the experience of having stood behind your decisions out loud.