I listened to a session last year at Config about a designer who did brand building and websites specifically for clients and was really successful, and then she decided to join a company that she'd delivered work for to see how different it was to be in house. She sought to find out whether her designs were successful over time. Were short-term metrics misleading? Was it successful or just short lived strategy that didn't need to sustain long-term growth. And she realized it was really difficult in house and there were many gaps in her assumptions on what worked over time. I think that story healed my soul somehow.
Building a plane while flying is a different skill set. Lots of co-validating your design impulses with sustainable systemic thinking in real time. Outwardly it might even look like you're moving in slow motion, but inwardly doing more mental processing than normal. Even if you love a direction, it might not be a fit long-term. And if you see potential, you still have to amplify and scale the vision, align and lift your teammates toward the common goal, and co-sprint to outpace the business's demand to pay down the design debt accrued. All while only improving 4 degrees from where you were at times. I think that's why I'm always impressed with internal rebrands at larger companies, somehow pulling off the production work on existing pipeline while inventing the new.
No knock on agencies that kick off or rebuild something as a service to businesses in need. Thank God for them because pulling on high-bandwidth availability in crunch time is so powerful. I'm just saying, it is an intoxicating moment in design to start from scratch. The blank canvas + the problem statement + audience + zero guardrails. The logo mark directions, the color and type system... the highly tactile dopamine hit doing something that causes you to make something from nothing is a different type of creative wrestling. It's not easy, and for sure different challenges exist in agency work that I'm well acquainted with... I just appreciate both sets of challenges in different ways.