From Publishing Books to Building a Design Studio

A quiet transition, a difficult decision, and the path that brought us closer to the work we truly wanted to do

It feels like we only blinked, and somehow we are already halfway through the year.

Three years ago, after the pandemic completely changed the direction of the book publishing company we had built together, Raluca Cristea and I found ourselves trying to bring it back to life. It was not the first time we had to change direction. Back in 2018, after a difficult setback, we had already shifted course once.

So we tried again.

We looked for solutions, adjusted what we could, and hoped that things would slowly fall back into place. But at some point, we had to make a difficult decision: to close that chapter.

At the same time, Mazoc Design already existed.

Our illustration and design studio had been growing quietly for a few years, almost under the radar. Most of the projects came through recommendations, conversations, and people who had worked with us before. There was no big launch moment, no perfect strategy, no loud announcement. Just work, trust, and projects that slowly started to build on one another.

The experience that shaped our direction

Raluca had already started working independently in 2020 with a company from the United States, creating branding projects at a very intense pace for their market. Before that, starting in 2018, she had already been doing layout, design, DTP, and pretty much everything related to the visual side of our books.

In 2021, after completing the Google UI/UX Design course, we started to push things further. We began taking on projects that, until then, we had only dreamed of.

In parallel, my own path had started much earlier and in a much simpler way. Around 2013, I began drawing commissioned portraits with a set of Faber-Castell pencils I had received as a gift and a Daco drawing pad.

That is how I stayed close to illustration.

Later, in a very natural way, visual identity, branding, and concept development became part of my work as well.

Looking back, both of our paths had been preparing us for the same direction, even if we did not fully see it at the time.

Going all-in

Only after our second child was born did we decide to go all-in with Mazoc Design.

It was the direction that felt closest to what we truly enjoyed doing: design, illustration, branding, packaging, visual projects, and creative collaborations.

Still, it was only at the beginning of 2025 that we fully closed the circle. That was when we officially informed the bookstores that we would no longer produce the titles we still had in the publishing company’s portfolio.

From the outside, it may look like everything happened naturally.

In reality, it was a long process filled with questions, adjustments, uncertainty, and decisions made along the way.

A quiet confirmation

Since then, our turnover has doubled from one year to the next.

And this year, in just the first half of the year, we have already surpassed last year’s turnover.

I am not sharing this as a spectacular victory. It feels more like a quiet confirmation that, sometimes, the right direction is built slowly — with patience, consistency, and a lot of work happening in the background.

Together, we started to understand more clearly what kind of projects we want to build and what kind of collaborations truly fit us.

Not every project is just about design.

Some projects ask for listening. Others ask for structure, patience, or the ability to translate someone’s idea into a visual language that feels right. Over time, we began to recognize the kind of work where we can bring real value: illustration, branding, packaging, visual storytelling, and design systems that help a brand become easier to understand and remember.

Learning to talk about the work

At the beginning of the year, I told myself I would start a series of posts about the projects we loved working on.

Projects in which we invested time, ideas, experiments, emotions, and many good conversations with the people behind the brands.

But time flew.

So today, I finally made the space to begin.

To keep things simple, in the next few days we will start sharing the first thread from a larger series of posts about the projects we have created at Mazoc Design.

Because sometimes, the hardest part is not doing the work.

It is stopping for a moment and telling the story behind it.

The photos are from the early days of our entrepreneurial journey, around 2017–2018, when we transitioned from printing photo albums to running a small print shop.