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One year, six designers.
A cohort begins in June and runs through May. Six designers, chosen carefully. Once the year is over, we usually stay in touch — but the formal engagement ends.
A small standing cohort of six designers, mid-career, who meet with me individually once a month and as a group once a quarter. No curriculum. No homework. A careful, recurring conversation about the engagements you are in and the calls you are weighing. Now in its third year.
applications open until 31 May · two seats available for the 2026 cohortMentorship gets romanticised. The actual practice is closer to a craft — deliberate, structured, oriented around judgment, not motivation.
A cohort begins in June and runs through May. Six designers, chosen carefully. Once the year is over, we usually stay in touch — but the formal engagement ends.
A sixty-minute conversation with me, once a month. On your engagements, your calls, your career, the question that has been quietly on your week. No agenda template — though we usually agree on one beforehand.
The six of you meet, together with me, once a quarter. Three hours. Each of you brings one thing you are working on. The room is small enough that we can be honest, large enough that no one carries the whole conversation.
I will sometimes send a short essay, a chapter, or — more often — a question to sit with for the month. Never a syllabus. Often the most useful thing is the absence of reading.
At the end of the year, each of you writes a short letter — to yourself, twelve months younger. We read them together in the final group session. It is the most useful artifact of the cohort, by a wide margin.
€480 per month, billed annually. Refundable in full at any point in the first month. After that, prorated. No upsells, no extra workshops, no surprise charges. The price has been the same for three cohorts.
"By month three I had stopped trying to perform competence and started thinking out loud. That is the entire useful difference. The work changed shape within a quarter.
"Ionut does not, as a rule, give advice. He asks the question I had been avoiding. I have stopped looking for other mentors. Three years on, I still send him notes after sessions I run with my own team.
"The quarterly group sessions are the part I would not have known to ask for. Five other careful designers, in one room, twice a year. That alone was the year.