She got the interviews. She kept getting the no. So she built the yes herself. After dozens of rejections from UK studios, this motion designer stopped waiting for a seat at the table and built her own. Now she is training the designers who come next.

When motion designer Mirabelle Morah arrived in Scotland from Nigeria in 2023 to study at the University of Edinburgh as a Mastercard Foundation Scholar, she expected a familiar path into the UK’s creative industry. Like many international creatives transitioning into a new landscape, she applied to studios, secured some interviews, and heard “no” more times than she expected.

“I was just very disappointed, even willing to take pay cuts but I do remember a friend of mine, Hammed Kayfactor, he used to say, ‘When you get a rejection, think about it like this: who dares reject a star?’ So I’ve always had that in mind.”

Mirabelle didn’t come from a traditional design background, she was largely self taught over several years until her animations, identities and campaigns grew to ask the same question, how can design help people belong to movements larger than themselves? Or take valuable actions? This concern with participation distinguishes her practice from much contemporary motion graphics. Her use of high-contrast colours, mixed media, photography layered against illustration, animation, and cultural symbols, even with a persistent Bauhaus structural sense underneath the density, creates an intense sense of feelings and emotions across her body of work. 

“I want people to feel different things from one message, from one visual,” she says, “and I want to include elements that make viewers feel included or represented.”

But Mirabelle didn’t feel like many of the design agencies she’d applied to, took into consideration her non-traditional experience and path into design. Unlike graduates from specialist design schools, Mirabelle largely taught herself through years of experimentation. She describes learning software one day only to use it on a real project the next, building her practice through online tutorials, courses and constant iteration rather than formal design education. That experience appears to explain why her work feels usually practical. Rather than treating design as visual decoration, she is consistently approaching it as a problem-solving tool. 

But at the same time, the rejections led her to solve her own problem, i.e., build a new design studio, Grohwie, and a design fellowship to support other designers facing similar issues that she faced. By June 2026, Mirabelle has already concluded the second design fellowship cohort, clocked close to ~300 applications in, and 26 successful design fellows graduating.

However, prior to these numbers were moments filled with uncertainty, 

“I wanted access to certain creative rooms and experiences. Was I scared to message the people who were already in the room? Yes. But I already was not in those rooms, so what did I have to lose if I sent emails out and people told me no, or ignored me, or ghosted me? You lose 100% of the shots you don’t take anyway” Explains Mirabelle. Yet from rejections, came the glimmer of light. From cold-emailing and direct messaging leaders from design consultancies and agencies like Koto to Dixon Baxi. Among them was Clark Scheffy, an IDEO Alumni who’d spent close to 20 years leading design at one of the world’s top design consultancies. Clark’s advice seems to have fundamentally reshaped Mirabelle’s practice. Instead of trying to become everything to everyone, he encouraged her to build the kind of studio she genuinely wanted to run, one whose values would shape the work it accepted.

He said “If I wanted to run a studio that produced fun things for certain kinds of organizations, I needed to build towards that. If not, I was going to get stuck creating work that didn’t represent what I valued. And another design leader told me to just look at design and communications as tools. They are sometimes not the end in themselves. They are tools to get to where I want to go.” 

Building off that advice, Mirabelle’s works, both individually and professionally seem to presently have taken that fun and social-first approach, and the result is a visual language that appears designed to increase participation rather than simply attract attention. This becomes particularly visible in her recent motion design work for an Edinburgh charity celebrating the milestone of connecting more than 100,000 young Africans to educational and digital opportunities. The project combines live-action footage with geometric animation and layered graphics, but its success lies less in its execution than its restraint. Rather than overwhelming viewers with statistics, the design gently guides attention towards gratitude, encouraging audiences to feel part of the organisation’s story.

And in a recently exhibited mixed media (illustration, motion design and augmented reality) piece of work which she exhibited at the Bradford African Festival of Arts, we see her fun way of using colors to unite 4 different West African cultures, to explain why unity in diversity and culture are important. 

Mirabelle herself describes every project beginning with the same question. “What’s the feeling or action I want someone to take from this? Companies want to make money, charities want to build community, donations, etc. Everyone has a deeper goal that they’re trying to use creativity and design as a tool to get to, how can I help this goal?” That question also explains why she founded the Grohwie Design Fellowship and, it’s the same question she teaches the fellows to ask.

For Mirabelle, the fellowship is not simply about teaching emerging designers how to use software or sharpen their portfolios. It is an attempt to give them the kind of proximity she once spent months trying to find for herself: access to working practitioners, real briefs, conversations about the business of design and the confidence that comes from seeing how creative work actually moves through the world. In that sense, Grohwie is both a studio and a response to a gap she knows personally.

Rather than waiting for opportunities herself, she began creating them. The Fellowship connects emerging designers with creative directors, agencies and live client work across multiple countries, helping them bridge the often overlooked gap between technical ability, commercial readiness and simply access into the design industry.

“I’ve met with people who are data analysts but have the most fantastic logo design skills. Sometimes they’ve only done personal work and recreated what other people have done, but they want to switch industries, and they don’t have the biggest client names on their portfolios yet. They just need a chance”,  says Mirabelle.

There is a thread running through Mirabelle’s work, from BlankPaperz Media to Grohwie, from her own mixed-media practice to the designers she now supports: a refusal to treat creativity as an end in itself. She is interested in what happens when design gives people a reason to participate, a way to feel represented, or a route into a room they might otherwise never have entered. Perhaps that is what makes the story of her rejections so much more interesting than the rejections themselves. She did not simply find another way in. She began building the kind of industry she wanted to find when she arrived.

Gbemi Lolade is the Founder of For Creative Girlss. She is a firm believer in the fact that there is no division between the ability for science/tech and the ability for Art. Her goal is to cultivate this ability with as many people as possible and execute great ideas