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5 Important Brand Trends for 2013

Wednesday, January 16th, 2013
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Is there anything more important than your brand? It’s your face to the outside world. As far as what you need to know to help shape your brand in 2013, Landor, the brand strategy firm responsible for creating the famous FedEx logo, saves us that trouble in their look ahead with a series of videos accompanied by a short downloadable pdf that looks at eight important areas impacting brands–gamification, brand purpose, Asian luxury, packaging, data, China, …
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Hansei 2012

Monday, December 31st, 2012
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It’s that time of year. That time when we invoke the spirit of Janus. Janus was the Roman god, the guardian of doors and gates, the god of new beginnings, as powerful as Jupiter himself. January is named for him. Janus was the custodian of the universe, and was seen as the originator and orchestrator of all things – the system of the years, the changing of the seasons, the ebbs and flows of fortune, and …
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Happy To Be Panned

Wednesday, December 12th, 2012
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I have a new outlook on criticism, which I attribute to Nassim Nicholas Taleb and his amazing, must-read (thrice, if you’re like me) new book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. As you can easily guess if you’re familiar with my writing, I look on the subtractive side of life: simplicity, elegance, emergent self-organization, and the power of what isn’t there. So naturally I would like this book. Plus, Nassim and I share an alma mater (we …
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Getting Better at Getting Better

Tuesday, October 16th, 2012
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The late, great basketball coach John Wooden maintained that, “When you improve a little bit each day, eventually big things occur. Don’t look for big, quick improvement. Instead, seek small improvement one day at a time. That’s the only way it happens — and when it happens, it lasts.” Wooden was talking about constant improvement, and was a master at the practice of practice as a means of always getting just a little bit better. …
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Mindmap of The Laws of Subtraction

Tuesday, September 25th, 2012
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I’m often asked about my creative process in writing a book. And I often asked artists and other authors about their unique process. I’m fascinated by the fact that I’ve never met two people with the same process. I just met Nathan Shedroff, experience designer par excellence and founder of the unique MBA in Design Strategy at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and he can’t imagine writing a book (of which …
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80th Anniversary of “Lunch in the Sky”

Thursday, September 20th, 2012
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The iconic photograph above, one of my all-time favorites, was taken 80 years ago today (September 20, 1932). 800 feet above 47th Street in NYC, eleven workmen sit nonchalantly enjoying a lunch break. As Corbis Images says in their 1930s retrospective, “No one knows the true identity of all eleven men, but for certain they were part of the new generation of Americans, descendants of late 19th century European migrants. The half-built edifice on which they …
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