Emphasis on the word your. If you’re not familiar with Frederick Douglass’s speech entitled What, to a Slave, Is Your Fourth of July?, you should be. You can read the text here. The Fourth of July is a few weeks away, but you can bookmark the speech and come back to it. Or you can do what I’m doing now. Think about the relevance of Douglass’s speech in light of …
Creative
Let me start with a few disclaimers. As a leadership team, we chose not to accept an invitation from another agency to submit a joint bid to provide creative and media placement support for the Mississippi Lottery. Even if we had chosen to participate, we recognize we may not have been awarded the contract. That’s the nature of the request for proposal process. I am not writing this to …
Working in a creative field can be incredibly rewarding and fun. You get to do the work you love, sometimes effortlessly, by simply working those God-given left brain muscles. However, it can also be very mentally taxing. Ever get those moments where you find yourself spinning your wheels and no matter what you try, you just can’t seem to generate a new direction or idea? It’s called a creative block. …
Comic Sans is a font that people love to hate. I’ll admit it—I myself am one of those haters. But I didn’t know the backstory of this designer-despised font until I came across a video called “A Defense of Comic Sans.” If you’re at all interested in typography, it’s worth a watch. Michael Stevens talks about how Comic Sans was created in 1994 by Vincent Connare when Melinda Gates asked him …
Last weekend, we had our annual team retreat in New Orleans. Yes, we actually worked while we were there. Probably because Mardis Gras hadn’t yet begun, but also because we tend to be fairly responsible professional adults. Fairly. Our home for the weekend was a partially renovated duplex near the French Quarter that had lots of character but not a lot of insulation, which meant there was liberal use of …
I know most people are over Pepsigate by now. That’s how the 24-hour news cycle works, I guess. I pulled some quotes from an article in the Atlantic (How on Earth Does an Ad like Pepsi’s Get Approved? written by Joe Pinsker) a few weeks ago because I think there are some valuable lessons to be drawn that may have gotten lost in the initial shock and outrage (not to dismiss the …
One thing I’ve continued to learn since joining FCG is that the most important part of designing a website isn’t composing something that is aesthetically beautiful/appealing (although we think we’ve made some pretty beautiful websites) but crafting an intuitive and meaningful user experience. At the start of any website project, we take the time to dig into the gritty details of structure and function before we even start to think …
Toward the end of Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc., Catmull includes a chapter dedicated to tech and design legend Steve Jobs. In that chapter, Catmull shares an exchange between Jobs and a Pixar director where Jobs compares the characters in a film in progress to Saturday morning cartoon characters. Now I am a fan of Saturday morning cartoons. Some of the best hours of my life were spent in front of a television …
This is a repost from one of our good friends, and a very talented designer/artist, Chris Jones of SeeJones Creative. I Am Not My Job So…about a week ago, I parted ways with my employer. There wasn’t anything bad that happened. I actually liked working there, but tough decisions had to be made and that position is no more. I had no hard feelings. I thought about making an announcement …
Here are six surprising facts you might not already know about how the creative mind works, which can hopefully to get your own creative juices flowing: 1. Workplace clutter makes you more creative. Here’s a creativity fact Martha Stewart certainly wouldn’t agree with: clutter actually makes you more creative. Research by the University of Minnesota discovered people in a disorderly room were more creative than those in an orderly …
Creating content on a regular basis for your company’s website, blog, and social media channels is no easy task. Therefore, our strategy focuses on efficiency and effectiveness. We understand that our fans, like us, are inundated with emails, updates and countless other sources of information every day. To avoid irking them with long and seemingly useless updates, we churn out content that is simple, relevant, brief and valuable. Here are …