In 2026, after nearly 90 years, the Institute of Design was folded into Illinois Tech's School of Design & Society.
This website is an archive of the impactful and inspirational work produced by the ID community before that transition.

László Moholy-Nagy opened the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937, treating design as a discipline that was teachable, testable, and consequential. Nine decades on, its scope had widened from the things people use to the systems they depend on: hospitals, government agencies, classrooms, supply chains, digital platforms. Along the way, ID community members developed the published research, methods, and frameworks that designers rely on every day.

Chief among them is human-centered design: close attention to how people actually live, and advocacy for what that research reveals. It shaped designers who are comfortable with complexity and ambiguity: curious, rigorous, inclusive, and stubbornly optimistic about design's ability to change the systems that shape our lives.

To every one of them, who taught, studied, built, critiqued, and stayed late in the studio: thank you, and keep designing.

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Jessica Meharry (PhD 2022): A Modern Guide to Starting a Design Studio

New Book Helps Students Navigate Client Relationships

May 23, 2025

Jessica Meharry Headshot
Working with Design Clients book cover

If you’re starting out in design, it’s important to get practical experience as soon as possible. But how?

In her effort to create a student-run design studio, Jessica Meharry searched for resources to answer exactly that question.

But she couldn’t find any—so she decided to compile and publish some resources of her own.

Her new book, Working with Design Clients: Tools and Advice for Successful Partnerships, was published by Bloomsbury in late 2024. Meharry co-wrote the book with Meaghan Dee, an associate professor of graphic design at Virginia Tech.

A visiting assistant professor at the Institute of Design, Meharry notes that the book is the product of “a lot of interviews, a lot of research, with faculty and with students.”

“
It’s really about helping students understand how to work with clients. For a student who’s just getting on board with what it’s like working with a client, this book can help them figure out some of the nuts and bolts of that—all the way up to a fully-fledged, student-run studio operating on a campus.
—Jessica Meharry (PhD 2022), Visiting Assistant Professor

The book offers information ranging from basic tips on how to handle invoicing and internal billing, all the way to how to walk a client through a feedback session.

“How do you envision where your client work will focus? What happens if you go out into the community and try to do more community engagement? What are the ethics and things you need to think about there?” These are the types of questions Meharry and Dee ask and answer in their book.

The book delves not only into how to find and retain clients and tackle real-world design problems, but also examines essential, nuts-and-bolts managerial topics such as defining work roles and handling logistics and planning. Its final section focuses specifically on student-led studios.

Meharry notes that the book is particularly important to students. “Design is so much about practice that we believe students have to experience that right away in their education and not just after they graduate.”

Research for the book was conducted with the help of a grant from the AIGA Design Educators Community.

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Jessica Meharry, PhD, Associate Professor, Columbia College Chicago