When the Client Says “Make It Like Apple”
I’ve been in this meeting a hundred times. The client pulls up a mood board or points to a brand they love and says, “We want it to feel like Apple.” Or Nike. Or some other brand that took decades…
You Want Your Creatives to Fail
Here’s the trap every creative leader falls into. You care about your team. You want them to succeed. So when you see someone heading toward a risky creative direction, you step in. You soften the edges. You steer them somewhere…
The Ultimate Guide to Creative Feedback
We’ve been deep in building Thriveful for a while now, and feedback is at the center of everything we’re designing. How it gets requested, how it gets delivered, how the community structure encourages the kind of critique that actually helps…
You Can’t Grow Without Real Feedback
As a creative director, most of my day is providing feedback. I review work, I push teams to think harder, I challenge directions that feel safe. It’s the core of the job, and I’ve been doing it long enough to…
Should You Do Design Tests or Nah?
From mentoring sessions over the past year, I’d say about 70% of the designers I talk to are now dealing with design tests as part of the hiring process. And almost all of them hate it. I hate them too,…
When There’s No Invoice, They Waste Your Time
I spent the first chunk of my career in agencies and freelancing, and one thing was always true: the relationship was transactional. If a client wanted a last-minute change or a rush job, we’d scope it out, send a change…
Use the Force and Trust Your Gut
There’s a moment in Star Wars that I think about all the time. Luke Skywalker is flying down the trench toward the Death Star. He’s got a high-tech targeting computer locked in — coordinates, trajectory, perfect math. Everything is dialed.…
Your Client is an Idiot (And Why It’s Okay)
I listen to How I Built This a lot. If you haven’t heard it, it’s a podcast where Guy Raz interviews founders about how they built their companies. And there’s a pattern that shows up in almost every episode that…
Why Your Goals Keep Failing and a Simpler System
I used to try to set big goals at the start of every year. I’d write them all down, feel motivated for a few weeks, and then somewhere around February or March something would happen — a work crisis, a…
Does Your Brand Look Great on Paper but Dead on Instagram?
I’ve sat through enough brand strategy presentations to know exactly how this usually ends. The strategist spends three months defining the brand’s “authentic soul” and “archetype.” They put it in a polished deck with stock photos of people looking at…