So last week during an interview for a radio show, we were asked what our single driving purpose is. What, the interviewer wanted to know, was our one bottom line? It’s hard question for anyone. But it’s extra hard for us because we don’t believe it’s a good strategy to be rigid about anything. Especially [...]

Have you checked out LinkedIn lately? It’s become seriously good. Three points: 1. No walled garden. By far the best thing about LinkedIn is that I can export my contacts. All the connections I make belong to me, and I can take them with me. All the value I create in my social network is [...]

Wow. You must visit tineye.com. It’s a new kind of image search. TinEye will look at any image you give it, and then compare it to other images. It can find a wide range of matches, including cropped images and photoshopped images. It actually searches visually, unlike Google’s image search, which uses keywords and image [...]

As you know, we’re, like, nanomoments from finishing our book for written on the city. And today, our friend Richard Oliver of Purposive Drift sent us a timely note, sharing his experiences in the final sessions of finishing his book Understanding Hypermedia 2.0 for print. Enjoy: Just thought I’d share an experience with you. My [...]

Kevin Kelly, co-founder of Wired, has developed a countdown clock to tell him how many days he has left to live, so he can make the most of them. I am now 55 years old. Like a lot of people in middle age my late-night thoughts bend to contemplations about how short my remaining time [...]

We’ve put together a new pdf for your reading pleasure. It’s called Dirty words & dick jokes, and it’s all about the seemingly innocuous words and phrases that consistently make the job of creativity harder. You can download it over there in the middle column. Enjoy.

This post by Grant McCracken is right on. …how important it is to have noise in the signal, noise in the brand, noise in the corporation. If once the meaning managers of the corporation hoped for perfect clarity, now they know that clarity is a problem, a barrier, and a failure. Hells yes. We’ve talked [...]

Here’s a good New Yorker article on a beautiful emerging sport called parkour, which is the art of moving fluidly over any terrain. Parkour, a made-up word, cousin to the French parcours, which means “route,” is a quasi commando system of leaps, vaults, rolls, and landings designed to help a person avoid or surmount whatever [...]

They’re boring. They don’t spark conversation. They don’t ask questions worth answering. They most often sound like this: “the new logo we created for (client name here) uses powerful diagonal lines to symbolize (generic brand values here).” Fucking kill me. Okay, okay: I’ll back up a little. We’re in a business that deals with the [...]

To continue the conversation: What if every brainstorm began with a meditation on impossibility, failure, stupidity, shame, etc? It might do wonders to get all that stuff over with before the brainstorming begins. Yes! And here’s why: Idea generation sessions are often mistaken as idea selection sessions. There’s an expectation that part of the job [...]

Last night my buddy told me about a sort of “negative meditation” he does to get himself out of a bad mood. It seems pretty straightforward and def worth a try: 1. find some privacy 2. set an alarm (1hr) 3. force yourself to be as negative as you can be until the alarm goes [...]

There’s a lot to be said for scrapping your action plan and just making things using intuition and passion as your guide. Some call this rapid prototyping. We call it makin’ shit. The idea is to commit to a high pace of creation and make your decisions on the fly (not ahead of time). When [...]

Something happened today as we were experimenting with possible layout directions for the Written on the City book: I stopped looking, I stopped thinking, and I finally felt like progress got made. Designers are trained to look. Scratch that, they’re paid to look. So I’ll understand if you want to kick me in the crotch [...]

If you’re in any kind of creative services business, you’re probably used to having potential new clients ask you “How much will it cost for you to [insert creative service here] for us?” And if you’re like most of the people I’ve worked with, you squirm a little (even if you pretend to be chill), [...]

It goes a little something like this: “We’ve got [or we want to have] a room where people can get away from their desks and cubicles and really get creative. In this room, the rules are different. Everyone sits on bean bags, and there are no computers allowed. Instead of staplers and keyboards, we’ve got [...]

In 1975, two artists—Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt—collaborated to create a deck of cards designed to help break creative deadblocks. Here’s what Brian Eno has to say about them: “These cards evolved from our separate observations of the principles underlying what we are doing. Sometimes they were recognized in retrospect (intellect catching up with intuition), [...]

Here’s a problem: Brainstorming ain’t what it used to be. All the recent hype about innovation has got people scrambling into their conference rooms to conduct brainstorms to generate ideas for next big thing. Problem is these brainstorms often aren’t as successful as they could be. When I was still muddling through the agency life, [...]

The NYC chapter of the AIGA has just put out this nifty guide with all kinds of resources.

[Insert cheesy stock photo of a banker with a telescope here] A friend of mine from college made a comment not long ago that I haven’t been able to get off my mind. He said, “I can really tell the difference between our friends who have vision and those who don’t. And I’m pretty sure [...]

Over at This Blog Sits at the, there’s a good post on building reputation and identity in a way that defies traditional branding logic. Here’s how it starts: When theatre people say why Cate Blanchett is a good actress, they say she is: * transformational and fluid * open * filled with contradiction * uncontrolled [...]