He Ran a Design Studio. Now He's Automating the Part Designers Hate

Rahmi Halaby knew something was off about his own agency before he had numbers to prove it. At Linden Ave Studio in Philadelphia, his designers would show up in the morning, open their laptops, and immediately start building pitch decks. Not designing. Building decks. Then they would spend the afternoon parsing client feedback that said things like “can you make it look more fun?” and trying to reverse-engineer what that actually meant. The clients were Nike, Google, Formula One. The talent was real. The workflow was not.

“Our team would spend hours on mockups, presentations, deciphering feedback that could mean anything,” Halaby said. “Junior designers, senior designers, creative directors. Nobody was exempt.”

So he asked around. He talked to over a thousand designers outside his agency and heard the same story told in the same resigned tone. Not anger. Acceptance. “Yeah, this sucks. It’s just a necessary evil.” That phrase, “necessary evil,” kept showing up. Halaby recognized it for what it was: an entire profession shrugging at a problem because nobody had tried to fix it.

The Findings

The conversations turned into something more structured. Over two years, Halaby talked to more than 1,200 designers across the industry. Freelancers working alone. Agency leads managing teams of 10. In-house designers at companies with household names. Creative directors overseeing departments of 50. The question was simple: how do you actually spend your week?

The answer, profiled in a HUGE Magazine feature earlier this year, was consistent across every segment. Twenty-two hours a week on operational tasks. Presentations, feedback cycles, asset resizing, file management, brand deck assembly, revision loops. Eighteen hours left for creative work. More than half the standard work week going to tasks that have nothing to do with the reason anyone got into design.

“When an entire profession treats a massive inefficiency like it’s permanent,” Halaby said, “it usually just means nobody has taken it seriously yet.”

The Company

Halaby co-founded Ideate in early 2024 with Waskar Paulino, the company’s CTO, who Technical.ly later named a 2025 RealLIST Innovator. The headquarters are on North Lawrence Street in Philadelphia. The company draws from a design community that runs along both sides of the Delaware, from Center City studios to the New Jersey agencies that share the same talent pool and the same clients.

Ideate is not trying to be another design tool. Figma helps designers make things. Adobe helps designers make things. Canva helps designers make things. Nobody, Halaby argues, has built software that helps designers manage the work around the things they make. That is the gap Ideate targets.

The first product out the door was Moodboard Studio, a collaborative tool for collecting and presenting visual references. It launched on Product Hunt in September and attracted a waitlist that has crossed 4,900 designers. Names on the list include people at Apple, Meta, Urban Outfitters, and IBM. The company also ships a Feedback Copilot, which uses language models to translate vague client comments into specific and actionable design tasks. There are automated brand deck builders and mockup generators. Each product maps to one of the time sinks Halaby identified in his interviews.

The Substack newsletter has more than 3,000 subscribers. Last fall, Ideate hosted Designers House in Philadelphia. The event sold out at over 400 attendees. Speakers came from Collins and CENTER, the firm founded by Alex Center, the designer behind Coca-Cola’s visual rebrand. For a startup that did not exist two years ago, filling a Philadelphia event space with 400 working designers is not a marketing trick. It is proof that the audience was already there, waiting for someone to acknowledge the problem they had stopped complaining about.

Why Philadelphia

The obvious question is why Halaby built the company here and not in New York or San Francisco, where the money is. The answer is practical. Philadelphia’s design community is smaller than New York’s but more connected. It costs less to operate in while building a product that is not yet generating revenue at scale. The talent exists. Moore College, one of the city’s design schools, has already signed on to teach design systems courses using Ideate’s tools, with the full graphic design department getting access in fall 2026.

For the New Jersey agencies and studios that work across the river, the proximity matters. The Philly-Jersey creative corridor shares clients, shares freelancers, and shares the same structural problem Halaby measured. A 10-person shop in Montclair dealing with the same 22-hour split as a team in Center City is looking at the same math: too much of the payroll going to work that has nothing to do with creative output.

Whether Ideate breaks through or becomes another startup that identified a real problem but could not scale the solution fast enough will depend on execution. The company is early. The waitlist is long but waitlists are free. The test will be whether the tools save enough time to justify paying for them.

What is not in question is the problem itself. Halaby measured it. Every other credible survey of the design profession has confirmed some version of it. And the designers across the Delaware Valley, the ones spending their Tuesday mornings rebuilding slide decks instead of designing, already knew it before the data arrived.