http://designersobriety.com Just another WordPress weblog Fri, 21 Oct 2011 13:32:50 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We all have times in our careers when we are driven by excitement and passion, and we all have times when work becomes a little more mundane. What is it that makes the difference? All of us can admit to feeling the ebb and flow of this spectrum. When we took ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/10/believe/ Unfortunately, in our current political culture, the notion that two opposing parties could come together for a singular purpose seems rather absurd. Rather, the norm is to stubbornly take sides. Dig our heels in. I'm right. They are wrong. Actually, this is nothing new. This was the case from our ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/09/lessons-from-nummi/ You already know this, but it's worth taking a step back and mentioning again. When it comes down to it, your business is based on one very important thing: relationship. The relationships that you maintain both between your employees (or coworkers) and your clients are crucial to the success of ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/08/beyond-work-top-outings-for-clients-and-companies/ Have you ever noticed that it's difficult to work quickly without having some sort of fall out? Sideways remarks, annoyed gazes or full out arguments seem to happen most often when the stakes are high. Whether it be personal or professional, tight deadlines and high pressure seem to be a breeding ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/08/going-fast-without-the-furious/ Remember in college when everything was new? You were just starting to dig in to the industry you hoped would one day offer you a job. You were doing everything you could to absorb all the information that you could fit into your 3 ring binders. Learning was top priority. For ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/07/are-you-still-learning/ Almost ten years ago now, I had one of those moments that impacted the way I have seen the world ever since. It wasn't a big event. It was a simple conversation. A conversation with a few colleagues about a particular event we were involved in. I asked them how ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/06/bring-on-the-haters/ "The internet is [now] showing us what it thinks we want to see, but not necessarily what we need to see." In the video above, Eli Pariser brings up a great question: is getting what we want, how we want it, all the time actually good for us in the long ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/05/information-vegetables-vs-information-junk-food/ First off, I have to say, there is something about hating that is fun. Whether it’s disliking someone who has wronged you or trash talking the competition, the rush of adrenaline you get from a little hating can have a sinfully addictive effect. It usually doesn’t take too long before these ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/05/don%e2%80%99t-hate-participate/ So, one of our interns (let's call him Steve) has an ongoing list he carries around on his iPhone called the "million dollar ideas list". It contains a variety of outside-the-box, mostly funny, ideas that are just reasonable enough to cause you to pause and think… "yeah, that just might ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/04/making-ideas-matter/ We don't lack information. But we often lack the ability to interpret it and use it. That's where designers come in. I recently attended a talk by GOOD about the history and purpose of their company. It was enlightening and piggy-backed off of something I've been thinking about a lot lately. We ... http://designersobriety.com/2011/04/information-design-relevance-change/