The Design Process

Thoughts and tips on staying fresh, focussed and creative.

Personal Projects – Finding your Niche

June 18, 2012

I wrote about personal projects a while back, to my great surprise it has become one of the most popular things I’ve ever written. I shouldn’t be surprised really, so many creative people have ideas about how to make a better this, or a cooler that — everybody has an idea they’re thinking about. Coming [...]

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The Jargon Problem

May 22, 2012

I’ve always been fascinated with language and the ways it can be used. Clear, evocative prose expressed in an authentic voice is such a pleasure to read. It can be so difficult to get an idea across in an engaging way, that I truly admire anyone who can pull it off. Of course, language can [...]

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Compassionate Design

February 24, 2012

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of compassion lately, and about how it relates to my work as a designer. It’s a tricky concept. When you look for definitions of the word compassion, ideas like pity and suffering come up quite a bit. While they might fit some situations, they’re not quite what [...]

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Product Licensing Gone Wrong
– Follow-up

February 2, 2012

My post in response to Bob Parks piece for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold and my comment left on the article comment thread received a very thoughtful response from the author. In my comment I had mentioned the parallels to the story of Bob Kearns, inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper, as [...]

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Personal Projects

January 30, 2012

Ideas are what creative people in any profession are all about. We can’t help ourselves. We’re always observing and analyzing and coming up with new and better ways to do things. Sometimes all those ideas spin out into things that cross over from our primary careers or professions into things seemingly tangential. When that happens, [...]

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Design/Build

January 25, 2012

image credit: Ethan Labowitz Design/Build is a trend that I’m seeing more and more in the environmental graphics work that I do. Clients are increasingly looking for the turn-key approach that can provide them with a full-service solution from design through to installation. I understand the motivation from the client’s perspective — they only have [...]

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Product Licensing Gone Wrong

January 23, 2012

A tale of invention, greed and bad timing: The Greatest Running Shoe Never Sold by Bob Parks for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The story shines a light on some of the best and worst of human motivations. It’s not the first time that a seemingly great product idea never quite made it to market and certainly won’t [...]

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Holiday Re-run

December 28, 2011

I’m taking the week off from just about everything, but thought I’d offer up something from the archives that you might enjoy if you missed it the first time around — Lessons From the Library It’s a post about the difference between searching and browsing, and what we’ve gained and lost as search becomes ever [...]

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