No. 42 | Seven design quotes to deploy in case of burnout emergency
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. ―Charles Mingus
creativity
Scratchpad
An ode to the tools that help us remember.
No. 24 | Seven lessons I’ve learned from building things
I recently spent most of a weekend assembling IKEA furniture. It had me reflecting on experiences with assembling, building, and creating physical things over the years. Here are seven lessons I’ve learned from building things. 1. To not get in your own way. You have to think a few steps ahead with most builds. “Painting … Read more
The Only Bad Idea in Brainstorming
Going through some old scans and found this card from when I was working on a talk about brainstorming. This still stands out to me as one of the more important aspects of a sucessful ideation meeting: Decide at the beginning what you’re going to do at the end. If you don’t constrain a brainstorming conversation … Read more
A Different Kind of Freedom
One of my favorite quotes of late, on freedom: Like most Americans, I shrink from the thought of subservience of mind or person. I too cherish the word freedom. But I want to be free to be painstaking if I want to, to be responsible, to be involved; to be free to exercise whatever intellect … Read more
I’m not more creative than you, I just write things down
Want to feel more creative? Write things down. Use a pen. And a piece of paper. And when you think of a thing, write it down.
Smaller Paper
A big blank canvas? Scary. A new Powerpoint deck with no slides? Scary. Designer notebooks packed with crisp, white, empty pages? I’ve abandoned dozens. My big ideas are built out of small ideas. I try to capture my small ideas in small, simple ways. Index cards. Plain text files. A few words added to a … Read more