AI: From hot ? to bot ?

5 ways we’ve used AI in our creative practice this year and what we learned. AI technology is growing in leaps and bounds and we’ve been experimenting with it in our creative practice. It’s become extremely useful in areas that we hadn’t planned on, and not as useful in areas where we thought it should […]

Co-Creation: When Users Become Co-Designers

co-creation

Co-creation in design is like bringing in a co-pilot for your project. You and your team have spent a lot of time in the design process; walking a mile in the user’s shoes, talking and learning about their journey’s, using your newfound knowledge to come up with some great ideas through brainstorming, developing them into […]

Refining A Concept Through Rapid Prototyping

Prototyping can be physical and digital

What do you think of when you read the phrase Rapid Prototyping? Making something out of nothing really fast? Playing with models to see how they work? While the phrase might conjure up ideas of a Star Trek replicator or some wild 3D printing factory, rapid prototyping is a design thinking tool that all companies can […]

Concept Development That Builds Strong Ideas

Concept development might seem pretty straight forward; you’ve completed the user journey, interviewed them to learn their perspectives and conducted detailed brainstorming sessions. Now you’re ready to select the best ideas and build them into winning solutions that will fit within the creative brief (or project goals, business criteria, etc… ) before being unleashed upon […]

Brainstorming Like A Creative Director

Do you ever wonder how creatives at ad agencies come up with new ideas on a daily basis? What type of brainstorming processes do they use to stay relevant to attract the viewers’ attention? At its heart, this overused buzz term is essentially that really focused, results-driven sister to daydreaming. Brainstorming generates ideas, challenges conventions, […]

Understanding Your Users Through Interviews

Talking is one of our most primal and basic functions, yet when presented with interviews or data on a computer screen, more and more people are choosing the impersonal interaction. User research has always held a high place within design but it now has come to the forefront with more people competing for customer attention. […]

How To Start Journey Mapping

Imagine being the proverbial fly on the wall watching your customer’s journey from recognition of your brand, through research to contact and ultimately purchase? What would that journey look like? What types of ‘a-ha’ moments would you hope to uncover? Journey Mapping is taking the hypothetical customer journey and plotting it out in a flow-chart, […]

A founder is not a CEO

Some people are better at founding and starting companies than running them. In the startup world, there is an undeniable myth that founders make the best CEOs. This myth was probably started by founders looking to retain their control over their baby, which is usually supported by only telling half of the story of the […]

Designers Should Be Writing

Designers are visual people, creating for the eyes and in-turn, the mind. With incredible skills developing colour pallets to fonts, tactile objects to expansive spaces, stunning images to coveted fashions, designers truly live in the now of visual creativity. Designing the interfaces on our phones and buildings for our offices the universal language of design […]

Why Your Marketing Isn’t Connecting

Demographics, a cornerstone of marketing, is quickly being replaced by Customer Personas. Marketing theory has traditionally said that customers all fit within prescribed demographics; age, gender, socio-economic status, education, profession, hobbies and more. While the traditional way of segmenting customers might have worked in the past, the theories can only serve to act as a […]

Why Founders Need To Invest In Their Startup

graphic design studio

Founders are the first to place a bet on their company because founders are investors. These investments come in a few forms; seed capital, sweat equity, partnership or in-kind contributions. Regardless of the structure, one truth remains – if you want to grow your business from a side hustle into a scalable, full-time operation, you […]

10 Tips To Write An Effective Creative Brief

Think of all the great creative work we see on a daily basis. How the right image paired with the right words evoked reactions. How a new interface felt like a friendly piece of software that you were able to use with ease. Or a new product that came in such precise packaging that you […]

How to Stay Creative While Under Stress

The bags under your eyes betray the forced smile on your face. It takes twice as long to get ready in the morning, picking the right clothes feels like a monumental chore, and in the end, you’re dressed in black anyway. Stress has overwhelmed you, hampering your ability to simply pick an outfit and now […]

5 Ways to Keep Revisions & Their Costs Under Control

Nothing kills the good feeling of deploying a great looking product to your audience than receiving a bill far higher than you had anticipated. Sure, there were some revisions but the back and forth for those final little changes didn’t seem like it took too much time. If you’re not mindful of it, revision costs […]

5 Habits Of Great Design Leaders

Being a designer is a dream for many. Full days creating beautiful pieces and stunning interactions. This is great for members of a design team, but it’s only the beginning for a design leader. We’ve all seen agencies and studios promoting their skills and why they ‘know brands’. But once you look a little deeper, […]

5 Ways To Adopt Design Thinking

Design is in the C-Suite. So what happens now? The cheers can be heard from art school classrooms, from behind drawing tablets in design studios and in long forgotten cubicles occupied by internal creative teams living in corporate purgatory. Design has won, it is now at the boardroom table. What will smart executives do with […]

How To Avoid Picking The Wrong Investors

Many first-time founders don’t realize this, but it’s crucial to understand that an investment round is not only the investor choosing the startup to invest in but also the other way around. Choosing the wrong investor can ultimately bring significant consequences which might take months or even years to correct. Recently we discussed what entrepreneurs should […]

The Value of Design Leadership in Business

As all designers know, great design doesn’t start with specs, but with the user. How will they interact with their creation? What type of look, feel, emotion, response should the design evoke? While the final products that designers create ultimately become the consumer face of a company, design has always lived its life in middle […]

What Entrepreneurs Look For In An Investor

Practically every startup founder has or is on the hunt for the right investor to seed their vision. While the wrong ones won’t necessarily ruin a company’s chances, the right ones can make your life as a founder infinitely easier through those all-too-critical initial sales. Below we look at five areas of alignment between a […]

Spending Less on a Freelancer (is it worth it)?

“That seems like a lot for a freelancer, why don’t we find a cheaper junior option?” And with those words, the start of the project from hell came to be. Not because the project had crazy requirements, but because in the quest to save some cash, a founder hired a lower cost freelancer only to get […]

Agency vs. Freelancer? What Is Right For Your Business?

“We really need some design help on this! Should we get an agency, or does anyone know a good freelancer?” This phrase has been uttered one way or another in practically every startup’s office within their first year of business, and it leads to the common dilemma, agency vs. freelancer? In my career – which […]

6 Tips for Effectively Dealing with Client Demands

We’ve all had that client. The one with a huge, last minute, complicated project and then try to play the role of ‘worst client ever’. They do things like neglecting to answer their phone or email, love to change their minds about details in the brief, all the while demanding that you do the impossible […]

12 Types of Difficult Clients & How To Effectively Deal With Them

We’ve all dealt with difficult clients — every studio has them. You know the one, the client who frustrates you to no end, who seems to have no respect for your craft/business, monopolizes your time and makes continuous unreasonable demands. Sometimes you might have more than one, and you probably spend your weekends in the […]

10 Things to Know About Fundraising

The moment you start fundraising, you begin running two product lines. The flagship product that you sell directly to customers (what most people know you for). AND Your company Investors are not clients of your product, they are looking at your whole company as a separate product that they may want to purchase part of. […]

Why Fonts & Type Matters

Type matters in an era of consolidating type foundry’s, digital design and Google Fonts, we’re seeing eroding emphasis on the importance of type. More and more, design is taking a ‘good enough’ approach versus taking the time to craft graphical arts, and the first casualty is type. Now I’ll admit, type was never my favorite as […]