The hardest part about working on The Most Amazing Projects Ever is that you can’t share the work until it launches. But your noggin is swelling, close to bursting even, because it can barely contain the nuclear blast happening inside.
Sometimes those projects are other people’s stuff, so even if you decided to leak a bit [...]

Small business, blah blah.
Design, blah. Blah blah. Design good. blah.
Logos and branding blah. Do this. Blah blah. Think about your people… blah.
SXSW. Blahgity blah blah. Not going…because x, y, z, blah.
Who’s doing what blah. Products. blah. Teleclass, blah.
Think different, blah. blauthenticity.

Tuesday morning. Puddles. Wet. Cold. Happy.

In the past few years, there’s been a spate of corporate rebranding and logo revising. Pizza Hut (oops, The Hut), KFC (what does that stand for again?), and Pepsi (does the new logo make it taste better?) come to mind.
My twitter pal @myklroventine pointed out this article today about Caribou Coffee’s branding makeover. Here’s a [...]

So you’ve started a small business. Yay! Now that you’re in the (shh!) secret club, these things will soon arrive at your doorstep:

A stack of books by Seth Godin
A special pass allowing you free business-class upgrades on every airline
A sackful of money to develop a brand that will put your business on a level with [...]

I taped this note to my monitor this morning:

Seems kinda lame that I would need to remind myself to do great work.
It’s easy for me to write myself stickies and create Google calendar alarms for stuff like “Taxes,” “Book flight to NYC,” or even client deadlines.
Am I really going to forget to do those? Unlikely.
The [...]

You know what’s better than perfect? Passion.
Push all the right buttons, follow the formulas, apply the stuff you learned in that teleclass. Who cares?
Nobody. Nobody will care if you don’t put all your passion into your thing.
Does it look weird to be so passionate? Do some people have trouble with that? Oh yeah. Who cares?
I [...]

Almost every time I connect with someone new, they ask me, “How did you come up with a name like ‘Sparky Firepants?’” Sometimes I even hear, “Wow. I wish I had thought of that.”
You know what? Sometimes I wish I hadn’t used it. It’s actually very personal, but I’ll get to that.
I enjoy the fact [...]

See that kid in the photo? This is my son. He’s two.
What do you notice about his face? Is it maybe unbridled enthusiasm and joy for the thing he’s doing?
Of course it is.
This is the quality you need to have about your thing to create great images for it. Nothing less.
The best people I’ve worked [...]

Remember when Buzz Lightyear found out he was just a toy and not really a space hero? A sad moment.
Google Buzz is sort of like that. Google has built itself up in its mind (it really is just one entity) to be a space hero when really it’s a lot of toys. Some really cool [...]

Would you fall out of your chair if I said, “Yes?”
Strap yourself in, amigo.
Yes. You can be too creative.
Fine Art vs Commercial Art
That’s a terrible heading. It assumes that one is better than the other. Maybe I’ll fix it by the time I post this. Probably not.
To illustrate (heh) my point about being too creative, [...]