POSITIVE DESIGN OUTCOMES
I help communication professionals win business by delivering on-brand design.
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Stepping out of your comfort zone.
“Are you wearing the same clothes you wore yesterday?” Maggie had taken until the afternoon to ask the question, but I knew she was thinking that from her puzzled gaze at my frazzled look. I was wearing the same clothes from the previous day. After all, I had spent the last night at the office…
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How to handle constructive feedback, otherwise known as criticism.
“The one with the holes in it sucks.” That was the first comment of my first stand-up critique in Lettering Design 101 at Southwest Texas State University. That comment, however harsh it may have seemed at the time, was a transformative piece of constructive feedback that set the stage for my future success as a…
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One way to prioritize the urgentness of your day.
We all have had that feeling. You are in the groove, in the flow state, and having a productive start to your day. Then you get the “bing” on your computer, the “ding” from your email, the “buzz” from your phone, and before you know it, everything feels urgent. If you have hair, it’s enough…
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Getting laid off is a winning proposition.
Imagine the shock when the entire corporate communications staff, except for me, was let go. Management told me to pack up and move out of our corner offices, which had a killer window view, into a new office space they carved out for me. And that ‘new office space ‘? It was a closet. Literally.…
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Baseball is a lot like the communication business.
How many times have we, as professionals in the communication and marketing fields, sent a finished, wholly proofed top to bottom, printed, produced, distributed, or emailed a piece of collateral only to have the third customer receive it and inform you that you have a misspelling in the first paragraph? A misspelling in the first…
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It’s always the little things.
If you are like me, you like to start the new year with a fresh perspective. Oftentimes, the best way to find this new perspective is to challenge myself physically. I joined Michael Easter’s 2% Manifesto Group on Substack this year. This community shares the philosophy that we can achieve more than we think, starting…
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What makes some words sticky?
We rushed to the front as the lights dropped, Garrett (4) on my shoulders, Brody (7 ) hauled between Elena and me as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros reached the stage. We were at El Cosmico in Marfa, Texas, to watch Sharpe, Mumford and Sons, and Old Crow Medicine Show perform on the “Railroad…
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Strive to be memorable.
Carlos and I were walking into a Chamber breakfast one morning, hawking our business, Swirl, and doing our usual scouting of where to sit – we intentionally split up – when Carlos noticed a clown, yes, a fully dressed clown, sitting at one table. “I’ll sit there, ” he said, leaving me to sit across…
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They named it Rush, which is a good thing in my book.
Create motion graphics in a snap with Adobe Premiere Rush. It doesn’t suck that they named it “Rush,” either. If you cut your teeth on web design in the early 2000s, I’m sure you crossed paths with Macromedia Flash, which Adobe acquired in 2005. Remember the good old days of Flash? After Apple dropped support…
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Will Generative AI continue to bludgeon us to death with slop?
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any weirder on the internet, Facebook released disturbing and hilarious AI profiles. After the expected backlash, our overlords at Meta pulled the release back but promised to return them soon. The proliferation of AI agents creating content is already happening, and the move to remove humans from the…