Intelligent Creativity is transforming how we create and use brand systems — Intelligent Creativity is a recent term to categorize a new wave of creative innovation that uses AI and machine learning, data, and automation coupled with human creativity, to reinvigorate creative solutions for marketing and advertising. For designers and creators of brands, the deeper integration and adoption of data, automation, and…

Understanding and embracing the mental models of others to achieve the best creative results — Visual design is one of the least sacred disciplines to practice. No matter your level of talent, experience, training, or college degrees, clients and colleagues will have no qualms about critiquing your work and offering their own “art direction.” If you take work personally, this can be annoying and painful…

A few things I have learned along the way about design and business that have stood the test of time. — My design career — if I can call it that — has now spanned multiple decades. The first thing I created that I would consider a proper design was a seven-inch record for a friend’s band sometime in the ’90s. By the early 2000s, I was designing websites. By the…

Strategies to help find creative inner discipline, seek perfection, push beyond and demystify. — When it comes to the idea of “performance” as it relates to graphic design and creativity there are many dimensions. Performance is not just about doing good work. It’s about the totality of what performance really means across creation, behavior, and dialogue; your skills, your aesthetic, your role, and your…

A master list of tips to make your student graphic design portfolio better I have seen and reviewed hundreds of student portfolios over the last decade or so and I am always excited when I see student work that is exceptional in both execution and ideas. The percentage of student…

Why brands put aesthetics ahead of everything else but need everything else for design to truly succeed — Aesthetics are an expression of purpose. What we believe, the choices we make, and the products and services we choose to use are bound up in our individual worldview and belief system. Our choices in life are a reflection of how we see the world. The same goes for brands. …

How Flash changed my life and what it has taught me about the future. — For those of us who came of age in the Dot Com Boom of the late ’90s and early 2000s, Flash was one of the most creatively liberating web technologies to ever come along. Before the adoption of the Flash Plugin, the web did not…

Embracing a more sophisticated approach to build better design and brand systems. Remote work has required all of us to divide our days into smaller and smaller chunks of time. …

The future of creative leadership will be driven by collaboration. — Creative leadership within the brand and design disciplines is fundamentally changing. With more designers working from home on distributed teams, creative leadership and decision-making is evolving to adapt to new paradigms of work. Compounded by global, cultural and social shifts, workplace culture is rapidly shifting to embrace empathy, diversity…