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A City Without Ads (Cidade Limpa)
See São Paulo’s skyline and you’ll notice one key missing feature. There are no billboards. Nearly 10 years ago – at the protest of the advertising industry and general approval of its residents (and minimalists everywhere) – São Paulo banned outdoor advertising. The city’s outdoor ad landscape was out of control at the time, so…
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You Just Pointed to All of It…
Often design feedback has me feeling like Hiccup in How to Train Your Dragon. Users take a look at a website and say, “I don’t like… (pointing their finger in circles around the design) thaaaat…” The weakness of many user surveys is that they can reveal how people feel about a certain design, put they…
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How to Sell Your Idea
One of the most difficult parts of bringing a new idea to life often isn’t coming up with the idea itself, it’s getting others on board. Just because your idea makes perfect sense to you doesn’t mean that anyone else will instantly get it. Helping people cross that bridge requires a lot of effort from…
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Here to Serve
A friend shared this quote from Andy Stanley with me today: “The question isn’t, what am I here for? The question is, who am I here for?” It seems that for many people, getting older means a shift from focus on me to focus on others. Children are consumed with their own needs and wants,…
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Jefferson Would Have Loved Twitter
Words are more abundant than ever. While we probably read fewer books than we used to as a culture, we read constantly. Social platforms provide an opportunity to hone our communication skills by their built-in constraints. Can you persuade, educate, entertain someone using only 140 characters? While constant reductionism can reduce meaningful discussion to a…
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Rubber Duck Debugging
In his recent videocast, Dan Pick introduces us to “rubber duck debugging”. As it turns out, this is actually a thing. Essentially “rubber duck debugging” means talking through your problem with a toy rubber duck (or similar object with equivalent IQ). In staring into the silent, supportive eyes of a rubber duck and being forced…
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The Lost Art of Listening
If all the policitcal debates filling our airwaves and social feeds are any indication, listening is a dying art. In the world of design, the first essential step to designing an effective tool is learning about the user. If we don’t intentionally take time to understand the user, ask questions and challenge our assumptions, we’ll…
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Marathon bands and the message you’re sharing
One of the highlights of a marathon is all the supporters in come out to cheer runners on. As the race weaves through the neighbourhoods of a city (just like Winnipeg this past weekend), many people setup music or even put together a band to play from the front yard to energize and entertain the…
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That’s not a lot of boxes
A co-worker recently shared Tim Urban great TED talk on procrastination. Funny and down-to-earth, Tim takes a light-hearted but challenging look at how we manage to put off the things we really should be doing. As Tim points out, tackling concrete deadline-based projects at work, school or home are one thing, but much more difficult…
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Complain by Creating
Complaining about the broken things in the world can be enjoyable, but at the end of the day, it’s not very helpful to yourself or those around you. As James Murphy said, the best way to complain is to make things. Some of the best tools we use today were built out of a frustration…
