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Design Your How: Balancing a Team

There's something to be said for honing your craft. For working day in and day out, burning through the midnight oil (and a few pots of coffee) to meet a deadline. It instills a sense of pride that's usually well deserved and, when thought through and applied correctly, can be an asset. Like any artist, musician, or performer, effective designers are offering p...
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The Designer’s Economy: An Introduction

In the mid-1800s a young man received a pocket watch from his father. Having grown up as a farm hand in rural Michigan, it's unlikely he was exposed to much of the day's innovation, so I can only imagine how captivating this technology must have been. Well made time pieces are a testament to detail, craftsmanship, and design. Gears fold into gears, which fold i...
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IndustryDesigningHow-Featured2

Design Your How: Communicate and Educate

There’s no way around it: Designers are arrogant. Well, good ones are at least. Which isn’t to say you should be arrogant, or that being arrogant will somehow make you a better designer (it won’t). But, as a general rule, good designers are just slightly full of themselves, and it’s part of what makes them good. Creativity does, after all, take a lot...
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IndustryDesigningHow-Featured2

Design Your How: Rules for Meetings

You know how it goes: You're sitting at your desk, you've got the soundtrack from The Social Network bumping in your headphones, and you're finally being productive (instead of wasting time on Facebook), when someone comes by and taps you on the shoulder. There's a meeting. So you take your headphones off, grab your notebook and go into the conference room k...
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IndustryDesigningHow-Featured2

Design Your How: Dealing With Client Pushback

Client pushback is an inevitable part of the design process. As designers (many of whom, nowadays, also consider ourselves entrepreneurs), we think we know our client's business needs better than they do and, sometimes, that's absolutely true. When it is, it's our job to explain why our design approach will produce more success—and ultimately more money—for...
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IndustryDesigningHow-Featured2

Design Your How: Work Backwards

Every designer and/or design firm has a linear process whether they know it or not. The process may be to ignore the process and instead rely on "magic" (like Michael Beirut), or they might have extremely strict guidelines about how and when things get done. Regardless, there is always a process, because every project has a drop-dead-drop-your-pencils-and-put-t...
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IndustryDesigningHow-Featured2

Design Your How: Why do you need a team at all?

Building a team brings a sense of legitimacy to something because it's a tangible element of "growth" on the part of a company. Other than your company's gross revenue or the size of your customer base, I can't think of a better supposed indicator of growth than the size of your team. Having a team means you have so much work to do that you need a group of peo...
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IndustryDesigningHow-Featured2

Design Your How: Collective Values (or Herding Llamas)

What is your take on the world? No, better yet, what is your company's collective take on the world? After all, getting a group of people—no matter how small—to agree on a shared direction and a plan of action to get there is no small feat. Herding cats comes to mind. Or perhaps llamas, since I would imagine llamas are a lot harder to herd; probably bec...
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IndustryDesigningHow-Featured2

Design Your How: Communication Breakdown

"Please fasten your seat belt, and prepare for our final descent." I didn't have a clue how true those words were — especially the "fasten your seat belt" part. In October 2008 I had the chance to go to Shanghai on business. I went with a team of six designers from Disney to help supervise the final phase of design for a new retail location, and to attend ...
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IndustryDesigningHow-Featured2

Design Your How: Get Busy

We've all heard the phrase "if you want something done, ask a busy person." And it's true: People work best when they're busy. Well, actually, I should rephrase that: People get the most work done when they're busy. Maybe it's just me, but when I come out of a client meeting with a to-do list that feels like it would barely fit onto an ancient scroll, I re...
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