Skip to content

Tag Archives: skills

Psychiatrists Are My Design Kryptonite

I have a superpower. It’s not fancy like flying or invisibility. I can predict the winner of the Bachelor/Bachelorette, well, my pick makes it at least as a second place winner. I’ve guessed correct winners before the first rose ceremony, even right after they come out of the limo… For those of you who don’t […]

Understanding Normal

The luxury market and comedians have a lot in common. A previous pieces talked about comedians having a sense of hyper-observance of the world, they have a great grasp on reality; The Normal. The luxury owners are similar in that they also understand The Normal. They have to know normal so that they can know […]

Edit Out the Fat

Part of the beauty of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa was how they were able to capture moments. On film, it’s a rare skill to capture those everyday moments by clicking on the shutter at precisely the right moment. The invention of photography alone didn’t allow us to capture these moments and stop time forever […]

Learn to Create and Infuse Poetry into Designs to Make Them Sing.

When the credits start rolling, you don’t immediately go back to the beginning of the DVD and say “That was great! Let’s watch it again!” At minimum you might wait another five months before you see this movie again, regardless of goodness. Whereas if you hear a great song, you can listen to it start-to-finish, […]

Future is for the Philomath Designer

I looked at the “T” in T-Shaped Designer under a microscope and the vertical is actually a lot more complex. Though the name is simplified to a marketable catch-phrase, it looks more like the image below: The misunderstanding of the T-Shaped Designer (specialization + generalist knowledge/experience/outlook) is explained in real-world terms in much more detail […]

Sex, Trends, and Relationships: Design Needs Comedic Research

“Jesters do oft prove prophets” – w.Shakespere, Tragedy of King Lear. Being a prophet is much more exciting than someone who understands the present. It’s mystical to know the future. But the jester, the comedian, actually does a better job of knowing the present, this moment in time, better than any other profession. The skills […]

When you know the future, you live in the past.

I’m trying to build a time machine to get back to the present, but I’m all out of fluxcapacitor. It’s a boring place to be, to know the future, but the anticipation of surprise, is what kept ninjas alive. Here’s some tips on forecasting the future: Few things that will try to derail and cloud […]

How to Hasten Skill Development: Learn the Eraser

My self-portrait looked like a hybrid of a comatose Native American and an Italian grandmother. I’m neither of those. I was a twenty-one year old Asian male. We had to pin-up our self-portrait on the wall for the entire class to critique. This was the very first assignment in freshman-drawing and I suppose the instructors […]

Drag Kings and Waffle Houses: The Design Preset

The Nashville air was filled with country music and the extremely segregated feel of the city made me uncomfortable. Cowboy hats were adorned by the patrons of the Coyote Ugly saloon and line-dancing is still more popular than ass-grinding, both which I’m clueless how to do. The gem that I stumbled upon was the Hatch […]

Artists Punched My Uncreative Face In

Artists have a focus to their work. The freedom and limited constraints, forces them to look internally and search for a meaning to infuse into their creation. With less outside-constraints comes a need to self-focus. In a zen-like state, the focus comes from within. Unlike design, they don’t have to consider the market, the audience, […]