It’s been a year since we have sat in the studio — less than a year since our team met to move our stuff out. But, what I said in the Twitter reply still stuck in the back of my head, “Our community is still strong.” And then it hit me. Like, hit me with a box of tissues, I’m crying, hit me. The IBM Studios Slack channel received a message from our sister studio in Böblingen, Germany. The studio leader had organized a Box folder of unscripted, personal, and heartfelt video messages from our studio mates. Many of them…

David Perell, shares his method of writing apparently based on this snippet from an interview with Seinfeld (I write that because the post does not include a citation or link to the statement quoted — still it’s good advice).

Writing and editing should be separate activities.

When I’m in this creation mode, I shoot for a flow state. I keep my fingertips on the keyboard and measure progress by how many words I put on the page. I have one rule: write down every epiphany immediately. The more, the merrier.

If this creation mode is defined by quantity, the subsequent…

Aasawari Kulkarni, an AICAD fellow at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, writes in TYPE01 magazine:

Helvetica in all its glory has more than served its life’s purpose and even if we in a combined capacity don’t use it for years to come, will not be lost or diminished. Then why not take a chance by making way for a little more expression where necessary. Peter Bilak says in his essay “We don’t need new fonts…”, that “there are typefaces which haven’t been made yet and which we need. Type that reacts to our present reality rather than being constrained…

Quartz comes in hot with news that culture trumps tools.

From their new guide, The Future of the Digital Workplace comes this tidbit of wisdom on “fixing work”:

Email promised to improve on the failings of phones, fax machines, and snail mail when it rose to prominence in the 1990s. Slack, the workplace chat company, vowed in 2013 that its software would sweep away the irredeemable failings of email and usher in a happier, more productive age of work. …

Thirteen ways of looking at a typeface.

Suddenly I could use any typeface I wanted, and I went nuts. On one of my first projects, I used 37 different fonts…

“Imagine if news wasn’t there.”

A campaign from three of Canada’s leading newspapers to raise awareness and protest “against Google and Facebook, which, the papers say, siphon off advertising revenues while making their own profits from sharing news stories.”

The campaign highlights a media-funding problem with no easy solutions. The Trudeau government says that it will propose reforms to how internet platforms pay for the journalism they aggregate — but it’s a tough measure to implement. …

The best non-alcoholic drinks.

A great non-alcoholic drink has all the elements of a great alcoholic one. Taste is deeply personal, but there are key components that make a drink feel balanced, namely a harmonious blend of acidity, sweetness, bitterness, salinity, and water. These layers of flavor play off of one another, blossoming as you sip or eat or lounge. The drink excites your palate and challenges you to figure out what exactly makes it so dang delicious, and why you can’t stop drinking it. The trick is creating that nuance without using alcohol as a base. Alcohol has a…

Last month my friend Brett Harned and I recorded a session of his podcast Time Limit. I heart this guy a ton, and I miss working with him daily. Brett and I recorded a limited session program called Sprints & Milestones. So, it felt good to get back behind the microphone to record this conversation.

This show is one of the better conversations that I’ve recorded in a while. You could call it a consolidation of what I’ve learned in the last five years of leading all kinds of design initiatives and range of scale at IBM, USAA, and InVision.

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