Latest posts

  • An Holistic Framework for Shared Design Leadership

    An Holistic Framework for Shared Design Leadership

    Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem.…

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  • From Beta to Bedrock: Build Products that Stick.

    From Beta to Bedrock: Build Products that Stick.

    As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months. Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on…

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  • Local Products Make the Best Swag

    Local Products Make the Best Swag

    Jim Katzman wrote a great article on Medium about creating swag that customers actually want. One of his tips was “Leverage Local Pride.” That got me thinking: Local products would make the best swag. Local products are easier Instead of designing a batch of custom pens or ordering another lot of logo coffee mugs, walk…

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  • The More Mindset: Rewiring Your Thinking for Purpose, Confidence, and Results

    The More Mindset: Rewiring Your Thinking for Purpose, Confidence, and Results

    The More Mindset: Rewiring Your Thinking for Purpose, Confidence, and Results written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Catch the full episode:     Episode Overview In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Diana Pagano—mindset coach, speaker, and author of The More Mindset. Drawing on neuroscience, quantum…

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  • Designing for the Unexpected

    Designing for the Unexpected

    I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine? Or design products that work on devices yet to be invented? Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design When I first started designing websites, my go-to software…

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  • Voice Content and Usability

    Voice Content and Usability

    We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations. Only in the last few millennia have we begun to commit our conversations to writing, and only in the last…

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  • Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt

    Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt

    In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task.  But on May…

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  • Design for Safety, An Excerpt

    Design for Safety, An Excerpt

    Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy. This…

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  • A Content Model Is Not a Design System

    A Content Model Is Not a Design System

    Do you remember when having a great website was enough? Now, people are getting answers from Siri, Google search snippets, and mobile apps, not just our websites. Forward-thinking organizations have adopted an omnichannel content strategy, whose mission is to reach audiences across multiple digital channels and platforms. But how do you set up a content…

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  • Breaking Out of the Box

    Breaking Out of the Box

    CSS is about styling boxes. In fact, the whole web is made of boxes, from the browser viewport to elements on a page. But every once in a while a new feature comes along that makes us rethink our design approach. Round displays, for example, make it fun to play with circular clip areas. Mobile…

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