Bring on the Learning Revolution!

I first watched this great talk by Sir Ken Robin­son a few months ago, and since then I’ve watched both this talk and his pre­vi­ous talk three times. Not only are his talks inspir­ing and thought-pro­vok­ing, they are also very fun­ny. He is tru­ly a great speak­er. Read More

We Need a Mind Shift

In this video, Lewis Pugh dis­cuss­es his jour­ney to com­plete a swim in a melt­wa­ter lake on the slopes of Mount Ever­est. This jour­ney taught him a rad­i­cal new way to approach swim­ming as well as a new way to think about glob­al cli­mate change.Pugh learned two impor­tant lessons on Mt. Ever­est:

1. Just because some­thing has worked so well in the past, doesn’t mean it will work well in the future. You must ask your­self, what type of mind­set is required to suc­cess­ful­ly com­plete this task?
2. You need to make a rad­i­cal tac­ti­cal shift, then com­mit 100% to it.

These lessons can also be applied to all dif­fer­ent types of design prob­lems along with fight­ing cli­mate change.

The Launch of OpenIDEO

Intro­duc­tion to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

This week, IDEO launched an open idea gen­er­a­tion plat­form called OpenIDEO. It is a place where any­one, not just design­ers, can con­tribute ideas, become inspired and eval­u­ate the ideas of oth­ers. The thing I like most about OpenIDEO is the fact that it uses col­lab­o­ra­tion to solve impor­tant social prob­lems. You can see oth­er people’s ideas and build on them. It isn’t the type of web­site where a com­pa­ny that is too cheap to hire a design­er can crowd­source their logo design for a $50 prize. OpenIDEO push­es the idea gen­er­a­tion plat­form to the next lev­el. Read More

The Creative vs. The Marketing Team

It seems like the clos­er I get to the last day at my cur­rent job, the more time I have to focus on all the things I find frus­trat­ing with my cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. My favorite pas­times include vis­it­ing the amaz­ing web­site Clients From Hell. It helps to know I’m not alone in my mis­ery.

I am also get­ting caught up on my Google Read­er sub­scrip­tions and came across this lit­tle gem today — The Cre­ative vs. The Mar­ket­ing Team: Yin And Yang, Oil And Water — Smash­ing Mag­a­zine.

The rea­son I like this arti­cle is because it breaks down the issues between cre­ative and mar­ket­ing teams and encour­ages design­ers to stand up for them­selves and their work. It is, of course, writ­ten from the per­spec­tive of a cre­ative per­son, but it doesn’t put all the blame on mar­ket­ing peo­ple. The author is real­ly seek­ing to have us all work bet­ter togeth­er. Read More

Designer Salaries

Recent­ly, I met an odd guy who, after ask­ing what I do for a liv­ing, said “Graph­ic Design­ers don’t make any mon­ey. A cou­ple of my friends are design­ers and they got laid off and are poor and work for almost no mon­ey.” I resist­ed the strong urge to punch “strange guy” in the face and instead gave him a death stare and told him his friends prob­a­bly aren’t very good at what they do. Of course he insist­ed they are amaz­ing (like every­one insists their design­er friends are), but I’m not tak­ing his word for it.

In today’s econ­o­my, there are plen­ty of tal­ent­ed peo­ple who are laid off and can’t find anoth­er job. Believe me, I’ve been keep­ing an eye open for oth­er poten­tial job oppor­tu­ni­ties for the past two years and there is not much out there. How­ev­er, I do not like being lumped into a group with every sin­gle design­er who ever lived, because there are a lot of unmo­ti­vat­ed design­ers out there who are con­tent work­ing for very lit­tle and have no intent of evolv­ing them­selves. On the flip side, I also know many graph­ic design­ers who are great pho­tog­ra­phers, illus­tra­tors and web design­ers as well. You can’t just group us all togeth­er in one stereo­type. Read More