While working on our Design Business for Breakfast talk on February 10th, Fiona Robertson-Remley said:

“Agencies and designers are usually hired for their design skills, but they are nearly ALWAYS fired for lack of project management skills.”

Truer words were…

It’s eleven in the evening, and the energy rush provided by the soda and pizza has begun to wane. The whiteboard is full of sketches detailing dozens of solutions to a particularly thorny piece of website functionality… but none of…

Have you ever watched a blind man eat a cheeseburger?

Before I skipped town for the holidays, my wife and I tried out a new sandwich shop down in the Ballard Blocks. After ordering and sipping at our iced teas,…

When taking on projects with hairpin-turn deadlines, high levels of technical complexity, and large cross-disciplinary teams that function across silos within a large organization, designers often have to assume a great deal of risk. This risk is often codified in…

Next Wednesday morning, Erica Goldsmith and I will be co-presenting “Connect With Your Clients,” a talk for the Seattle chapter of the AIGA.

Here’s some of the topics we’ll be covering:

What an account manager really… does to keep client

This will be the new decade of design thanking.

Not thinking. Thanking.

After hearing John Thackara speak last year, it really sunk in for me that design as a thankful or generous gesture—without any measure of expected reward or large-scale…

The email arrived at 2:43 PM, marked high priority. It ended with the following words: “We’re going to postpone our web site redesign until our sales pick up.” Hmm… could there be an causal association between sales volume and the…

When deep in discussions with a client over wireframes for highly complex systems, I’ve developed a simple way of defusing discussions regarding aesthetics:

Wireframes are the why. Visual design is the how.

If a client disagrees with why… a specific

The words of media prophet Marshall McLuhan: “We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us.”

Well, our newfangled tools are becoming… thoughty. Or perhaps a better word: impressionistic.

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The intellectual currency of…

Rock climbing is physical problem solving, a process of continually resisting of gravity (and physical harm). In a way, it’s a kind of controlled falling. Similarly, design is a kind of controlled failing, ever climbing towards a “certain” goal without…

In 1998, I remember catching up with one of my former classmates from college and hearing about their experiences of working at their first design studio as an intern. She related to me the following story (which I hope wasn’t…

Tape this to your monitor:

“We’ll be more than happy to make the changes that you’ve noted to this most recent round of [name of deliverable]. However, to accommodate your request, there will be an impact on the project schedule…

On a daily basis, I am bombarded by hello.

Outside my office, there are solicitors associated with a wide variety of nonprofits—Greenpeace, the Red Cross, Save the Children, and other organizations that are licensed by the city of Seattle to…

‘Tis the season to give books—and read a few yourself!

Here are fourteen books that I recommend purchasing for your designer friends and/or yourself to enjoy in this upcoming year. You can also check out last year’s holiday bookshelf.

In …

Whether you’re a freelancer, an in-house designer, or working at an agency or studio, you can never know too much about the business side of design. And in today’s tough economy, you need that business edge even more.

In “Design…

I spent time over the past three months with IDEO’s Human-Centered Design (HCD) toolkit, which is derived from the daily practices used within their firm as well as by design practitioners around the globe. In answering a recent survey they’d…

Hell is not other people. Hell is being surrounded by free candy.

Much as a child is forced to smoke a carton of cigarettes when caught out on the back porch with a Marlboro Light, my avoidance of any and…

Many thanks to my friend Ric Ewing, who was a co-author of this piece.…

Pick a card from the deck that I’ve fanned out before you. Memorize the card, then place it on top of the deck. I’ll let you

If you want to break a client’s heart, sell what you don’t know how to produce. Bill your client the time necessary to learn the tools you need to make them happy. Wow them with your big thinking and static…