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. …
Design
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 …
We are in the height of the technology age, where phones are used for everything except calling, cars park themselves, and social media is the number one source of information. A strong social media presence is essential in the marketing efforts of nonprofits and small businesses, so it is important that you have social media expert on staff or outsource to an agency with expertise in inbound marketing through social …
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 …
I learned early in my college career that if I wanted “real-world experience” I needed to get out into the real world. I was fortunate enough to have an incredible professor that not only arranged an interview for me at a local television station, but she also went to the interview with me to ensure that I would really benefit from the opportunity. The internship was unpaid. However, what I …
I never interned while I was in college, so I missed that whole experience. After six years, I have gained plenty of experience being on the other side of the internship equation, and as an employer (i.e. the offerer of internships), I have gleaned a few things from some extremely pleasant interns and other excruciatingly painful internship periods that may be helpful to other small businesses thinking about offering an …
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 …
But the App Store’s middle class is small and shrinking. And the easy money is gone. I found this article (Life and Death in the App Store by Casey Newton) on Longform.org (a great place to find awesome literary and journalistic jewels) and was very intrigued for a few reason. First, the struggles of the Pixite, the company that the article features, are directly related to the need to create a sustainable business …