Florence --:--:--
YCS® · Florence, Italy · Prepared for Client
Everything Milo and Stiv are building right now, and what yours would cost.
YCS is a studio in Florence and Milan. This is what we actually invoice month by month, when the board is clear, and what one month off it would cost to build the studio properly.
Three people, one head.
Small on purpose. Nick sets the frame, Milo and Stiv direct it into the two places it has to land.
Nick
Founder
Nick takes the conversation before there is a brief: what the thing is trying to become, who it is for, what it should make people feel. He sets the frame the other two direct inside, so that the first concept and the last detail look like they came out of the same head.
Owns: Positioning and concept, The world: tone, references, rules, The studio and how it runs, The client relationship.
Milo
CD & Product Direction
Milo turns the direction into the things people actually touch: the site, the product interface, the release platform, and the design system that keeps them all speaking the same language after we leave.
Owns: Web and product design, Design systems and hand-off, Front-end direction, Everything shipped and live.
Stiv
Digital Artist & Motion Direction
Stiv gives the world a way of moving. The hero film, the loops, the identity in motion, the cutdowns: the pieces that carry the idea in the places where it has three seconds to land.
Owns: Film and art direction, Motion language and identity in motion, Social and release assets, Post and finishing.
The rules we actually keep.
Not values on a wall. These are the things that decide whether we say yes, and how the work goes once we do.
01 — We come in before the brief is closed.
Not the studio you hand a finished decision to. The emptier the page the more we are worth, and if everything is already settled and you need it carried out exactly, we are the wrong studio.
02 — Every project gets a world, and it holds.
Imagery, tone, references and rules that belong to one reality. From the first concept to the last detail it should look like a single head thought the whole thing.
03 — We stay until it is real.
We do not stop at strategy. We want to watch the idea become something that exists, and by the end it should be obvious the project would have gone differently without us.
04 — Few projects, all the way in.
Better to go the whole distance on a handful of things than to produce a lot of surface. It is why there are never many of you at once.
05 — Recognisable for how we think, not for a style.
A record or a product, a film or an interface: the thread is people building something that did not exist yesterday. The output changes enormously. The level of idea and care does not.
The board
Milo — € 8.500 in flight
Trust the locals
Trip planning platform · Product & web
€ 3.500 · due 06 OCT
A travel platform where the itinerary is built by people who live there. The whole planning flow — travellers, dates, flights, stays, interests, budget — designed as one guided sequence rather than a form.
Istituto Gallimberti
Website · Web design · Framer
€ 2.500 · Waiting on the client
A clinical institute that treats addiction with TMS. The site has to carry authority and warmth at once, and make a hard subject approachable without softening the science.
Teticum
Brand sprint · Brand & identity
€ 2.500 · due 13 OCT
Naming carried into a full identity: mark, motion, palette and the rules that keep it together.
Stiv — € 4.000 in flight
Artie 5ive
Live motion · Live & visual art
€ 4.000 · due 05 NOV
Set design, visual art and the moments that punctuate the Aspettando Vittoria tour: what the room sees between and behind the songs.
The maths
9 months invoiced this year, € 57.350 in total: an average month of € 6.372 and a best month of € 11.200. From OCT the board is clear.
- JAN 2026 — € 8.200
- FEB 2026 — € 3.900
- MAR 2026 — € 4.750
- APR 2026 — € 6.000
- MAY 2026 — € 11.200
- JUN 2026 — € 7.800
- JUL 2026 — € 8.350
- AUG 2026 — € 150
- SEPT 2026 — € 7.000
- OCT 2026 — free
- NOV 2026 — free
- DEC 2026 — free
€ 12.000 for one month
One month, both of us.
A start-up bonus: € 6.000 each for Milo and Stiv, one month, to build the studio instead of billing for it.
This is not a commission and there is no brief to answer. It is one month in which neither of us takes client work: the month where the studio gets conceived, positioned and designed properly, with all of our attention rather than whatever is left over once the invoices are out.
€ 12.000 in total: € 6.000 each for Milo and Stiv, one month, no minimum.
- Both of us off the board for one month
- The studio designed, not squeezed between projects
- Positioning, identity and the way we work, decided
- Nothing else running alongside it
Then pick a tree.
It starts with a week off the grid, all of us, no slides.
Kickoff is not a call. We go somewhere with no reception, put the whole studio on a wall and come back with the plan already made. Pick the tree and the month starts there.
Stolpehytta
Modum, Norway · One week
A glass-fronted cabin up on stilts in the Norwegian pine, with the bed facing the forest and a deck wrapped around it.
StromDom Dva Duby
Nová Baňa, Slovakia · One week
A black box in the beeches, cedar-lined inside, reached by a staircase with a wood stove already going.
Nid d'Amour
Martillac, France · One week
A shingled sphere and a timber lodge joined by a lit rope bridge, with a pool in the trees below.
Lozoya Treehouse
Gargantilla del Lozoya, Spain · One week
A round platform in the oaks an hour from Madrid, under a sky with nothing in the way of it.