Market is primed for “readerless books” After seeing the growing interest in driverless cars, I’m designing a new line of readerless books. I think the market is ready for an innovative solution like this. Imagine the time saving potential–a book that sits quietly in a corner and reads itself! These books are virtually indistinguishable from […]

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Ideas

This is a continuation of an earlier post, The Creative Process, Part I: The Myth of Orderly Progress. Creative work is non-linear Some work follows a clear path. Step 1 is always followed by Step 2, and if you know how many steps there are you can have a pretty good idea of how the […]

This article is in: Creativity, Design, Ideas, Illustration, The Nerdatorium

I don’t always know what I’m doing When I worked as a house painter, it was easy to figure how the work would go and how long it would take. You have a 2″ brush and 300 feet of trim to paint. There were occasional problems but for the most part the goal was clear, […]

This article is in: Creativity, Design, Ideas, Illustration, The Nerdatorium

Why read books? Books take us beyond ourselves and give us access to experiences, thought and wisdom that we could not otherwise reach in our short time.

This article is in: Book Design, Books, Ideas, Illustration

Martin Luther King, Jr’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”

This article is in: Being Human, Community, Ideas

  Don’t overcook your good ideas Design by committee and endless revisions can turn the best idea into a charred, smoking wreck. Most projects begin with a spark of a creative idea, and that spark can grow into a complete, developed finished piece. But the revision process can be brutal on that initial idea, especially […]

This article is in: Creativity, Design, Ideas

Possibility usually comes disguised as hard work. Don’t expect your next project to be easy. Things fall apart Anyone who tries to make something or do something finds that there is resistance. It’s an accepted fact of life that things tend toward disorder–cars break down, paint peels, joints begin to ache as we age. We […]

This article is in: Community, Creativity, Ideas

Making fur hats out of kittens When people in college told me they were studying marketing, they might as well have told me they studying to make fur hats out of kittens. I thought it was universally acknowledged that marketers were in the same camp as payday loan peddlers, Ponzi schemers and email spammers. I remember […]

This article is in: Branding, Ideas, Identity

My first ideas are usually terrible. But those first attempts aren’t a waste of time, because working through bad ideas is what makes good ideas possible.

This article is in: Creativity, Ideas, The Nerdatorium

Years ago I read in the preface of a collection of a photographer’s work about a book that was impossible to make.  The book he was describing would never exist because it was a collection of  images that had never been created.  This photographer (whose name I’ve forgotten) was referring to the missed images–the moment […]

This article is in: Creativity, Design, Ideas, Illustration, Logo Design