Sitting on the cabin’s deck was like having a front-row seat at a dragstrip. The birds would park themselves on the perches of a bird feeder, seesawing back and forth to take little sips of sugar water. Then, with a…

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One morning, I had a dream that I was eating a red-hued apple. With each bite, the fruit would yield to my teeth with a pleasant snap—but over time, it began to dawn on me that I wasn't making any…

When considering the skills that today’s designers need to be successful in today’s job market, we often focus on job requirements, which are listed in tidy bullet points on recruitment requests:

Experience working in Adobe Creative Suite version du jour…

The rules of the road? There are no rules. Riding in a fast-moving car, the freeway is a fat, pulsing vein, and we are but one blood cell swirling through the body called Dhaka.
Oncoming traffic doesn't matter, since we…

Hot off the presses, I thought I’d share with you the cover for my next book, Success by Design: The Essential Business Reference for Designers.*

I’m currently knee-deep in designing the 325-page book, from the cover (which you can see…

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The third webcast in my series for HOW is coming up this Thursday, November 17th. If you’ve wondered how you can bring the thinking from Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills into your team brainstorming practice, this…

This is the second part of a recap that was written over 51 hours at the HOW Interactive Design Conference, then delivered to attendees as a 45-minute closing talk. Read the first part here.

Now, for those of you that…

This is the first part of a recap that was written over 51 hours at the HOW Interactive Design Conference, then delivered to attendees as a 45-minute closing talk. The second part will appear on Tuesday.

During the first day…

The above slides are from a talk I just gave at the HOW Interactive Conference in San Francisco on November 2nd, entitled “Information Architecture: Making Information More Accessible and Useful.” The talk was about how designers can help people make …

The second webcast in my series for HOW is coming up next week, on Thursday, October 27th. If you haven’t utilized the methods in my book Creative Workshop: 80 Challenges to Sharpen Your Design Skills, this is a great opportunity…

In talking with entrepreneurs of many stripes over the past year, I’ve heard the following hypnotic refrain repeated over and over again: “If we design a beautiful user experience, we’ve got what we need to launch a successful business.”

Whether…

Hi. I’ll be hosting a 3-part webcast series before/after HOW’s upcoming Interactive Design Conference, focused on sharing ways that designers can more effectively brainstorm and collaborate in teams. If you haven’t utilized the methods in my book Creative Workshop: 80…

In previous posts, I discussed the building blocks that comprise studio culture, and the first “hard” building block, the type of work you’re seeking to fulfill. But once you know what kind of work you’d like to create, you’ll need…

How can today’s designers learn to design for interactive? What books they should read, what websites they should visit, what tools they need to learn how to use, and what technologies are most important for landing that next big job?…

After 10 years living in the Pacific Northwest, Mary and I have decided to move to the sunnier climes of Oakland, California.

I will continue to be a Principal Designer at frog, now working out of the San Francisco studio.…

This is an extensive rewrite of a previous ChangeOrder post for my next book Design Business from A to Z—so much so I’m reposting it!

The website went live last week, and the entire staff is throwing a party to…

This weekend, I participated in HOW Design Live, a U.S.-based conference intended to help designers, in-house design managers, and creative freelancers gain the information and inspiration they need to succeed with their design work. One of my contributions to the…