I want to tell my story. It’s about how, up until 2 years ago, I never felt productive in my work. It went something like this: It’s a Friday or Saturday night and I have some free time to work on personal or freelance projects and I wouldn’t know what to start on. Or I […]
Fear of failure is overrated
“What people are afraid of isn’t failure. It’s blame. Criticism. We choose not to be remarkable because we’re worried about criticism. We hesitate to create innovative movies, launch new human resource initiatives, design a menu that makes diners take notice, or give an audacious sermon because we’re worried, deep down, that someone will hate it […]
What I learned at An Event Apart – Austin
Over the month of October, I recapped all 12 conference talks in previous blog posts. Looking back through my notes from each speaker and blogging about my take-aways helped me really organize my thoughts and remember all the great things I learned. The things I heard at the conference fall into one of three categories: […]
An Event Apart: Jared Spool
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Jared Spool spoke about why it’s great time to be an experience designer. Here are my take-aways: Design = The rendering of intent Imitation is: less expensive less risky where design is not valued On the flip side, innovation is: more expensive more risky where design is valued […]
An Event Apart: Mike Monteiro
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Mike Monteiro spoke about how it’s often the designer who’s at fault when the client requests something that makes designers want to role their eyes. The whole talk was full of really awesome quotable bits of advice. So these take-aways are basically all of those quotables: Mike Monteiro […]
An Event Apart: Beyond Play by Joshua Davis
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Joshua Davis shared his thoughts on why work and play should be the same, but for many, they are opposites. Here are my take-aways: Joshua Davis is a generative artist who uses computer code to generate repetitive patterns and designs that are highly detailed and pretty amazing – […]
An Event Apart: Preprocessing is for Everybody
At An Event Apart – Austin 2013, Chris Coyier shared his thoughts on CSS Preprocessing, specifically SASS. Here are my take-aways: CSS as a language is not as ‘abstracted’ as it could be, and so preprocessing serves to solve this. Preprocessing involves writing variables, mix-ins which are sets of variables, extends, and other short-hand ways […]
Nicholas Burroughs once said…
Minimalism is not a lack of something. It’s simply the perfect amount of something. —Nicholas Burroughs
Malcolm Gladwell once said…
Hard work is a prison cell only if the work has no meaning. —Malcolm Gladwell
Dieter Rams once said…
Question everything generally thought to be obvious —Dieter Rams For me, right now, this means – rethink all of my design tendencies. For example: Is Helvetica right for this project too? Does this website need to be centered (margin: 0 auto; for the web nerds)? Do buttons need rounded corners and a gradient? In your […]
On critiquing design
A person tends to critique a design in one of several ways. The most common, and usually least valuable, is by gut reaction. — D. Keith Robinson I totally agree here. I remember back when I interned at Workbench Magazine (now My Home My Style) and the Assistant Art Director, Doug Appleby would critique the […]
It’s not a pink slip, it’s a blank page.
I ran across this documentary on Hulu about a month ago. Lemonade tells the story of laid-off folks (mostly in advertising and creative fields) who are taking full advantage of all their extra free time. They are pursuing their true passions and finding so much joy in it. You might say that they are making […]
Questions: Design Style
I recently had a conversation with a good friend about design styles. The question was posed to me… That begs the question….is it better to develop your own “style” that you become recognized by, or have an arsenal of styles to draw from to please your clients? Both have valid arguments… That’s a tough question. I think […]