When I moved to Chicago in 2002, I knew very few people and had time and energy to explore my new hometown. I felt ready to step outside of my comfort zone — so, I signed up for an acting class. Which was ironic, because I’d just vacated the city where everyone is an actor. […]
These days, you can follow a movie’s production schedule for months or even years before it’s released. Director and casting rumors, set photos, interviews with the right entertainment magazines and websites, social media campaigns — no rock is left unturned for a movie that wants to build incredible anticipation. However, there’s one movie-marketing tool in particular […]
Logos. They’re everywhere we are. Maybe we don’t think we pay too much attention to them. But some of our more ubiquitous brands’ logos have gone through both major and subtle design overhauls — for better or worse. Here are a few examples. Identity crisis. Xerox is a steady, solid brand — we all know the company; […]
So yeah, this article probably isn’t very good really…There are probably a million other articles 10 times better…Umm…So, yeah. Sorry… What you should be reading instead is The Atlantic magazine’s audacious new story “The Confidence Gap.” According to the article, evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men — and that to succeed, confidence […]
Q: I’ve created an amazing new product, but no one understands how it works. What’s the best way to educate and excite potential users? A: We frequently work with large companies and start-up clients offering products and services that are relatively new to the world. But no matter how cool a product or service — […]
As projects ramp up and we all race to deliver on deadlines, often my impulse is to shift into high gear and speed up as well. But then my intuition kicks me and says hey, slow it down — knowing that in the end, it will pay off. Slow down to go faster. This is how I […]
I’m not unbiased when it comes to Buzzfeed, the Internet-based purveyor of quizzes, listicles and sort-of-news. It’s not that I worked or wrote for them — nothing like that. Basically, I think their content is about 95% useless. How many slideshows about Beyoncé and kittens does the world need? Hand in the Cookie Jar In […]
What do you mean by integrated marketing? A new client asked me this the other week. He’s a smart guy with a lot of experience, so I paused to try to give him a more thoughtful answer rather than just barfing out a definition gathered from Wikipedia (of which there are at least three). In […]
We see words and read text everyday — any of you design nerds ever wonder what makes up the anatomy of a letter? There is a standard set of terms to describe the parts of a character. These terms, and the parts of the letter they represent, are often referred to as “letter anatomy” and what […]
What does preparing for a singing competition have to do with market research? Turns out, a lot! Last week, I participated in a pop song competition at Martuni’s, an SF piano bar I frequent often. The competition required me to prepare and sing two pop songs, or songs in styles that were closely related to […]