Latest posts

  • Design for Amiability: Lessons from Vienna

    Design for Amiability: Lessons from Vienna

    Today’s web is not always an amiable place. Sites greet you with a popover that demands assent to their cookie policy, and leave you with Taboola ads promising “One Weird Trick!” to cure your ailments. Social media sites are tuned for engagement, and few things are more engaging than a fight. Today it seems that…

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  • Design Dialects: Breaking the Rules, Not the System

    Design Dialects: Breaking the Rules, Not the System

    “Language is not merely a set of unrelated sounds, clauses, rules, and meanings; it is a totally coherent system bound to context and behavior.” — Kenneth L. Pike The web has accents. So should our design systems. Design Systems as Living Languages Design systems aren’t component libraries—they’re living languages. Tokens are phonemes, components are words,…

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  • 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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  • Why Voice AI Is Ready for Prime Time

    Why Voice AI Is Ready for Prime Time

    Why Voice AI Is Ready for Prime Time written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Catch the Full Episode: Episode Overview Voice agents are rapidly evolving from novelty tools into core revenue infrastructure. Instead of functioning as glorified talking FAQs, today’s AI voice systems can serve as qualifiers, schedulers, concierges, onboarding guides,…

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  • Upskilling Your Team for What’s Next

    Upskilling Your Team for What’s Next

    Upskilling Your Team for What’s Next written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing Catch the Full Episode: Overview In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, John Jantsch interviews Rob Levin, serial entrepreneur, chairman and co-founder of Work Better Now, and author of The New Talent Playbook: The Ultimate Guide for…

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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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  • 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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  • 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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