Doing your work allows you to cross the canyon of the unfamiliar. For creatives, the canyon between you and who you want to be can not be filled, but it can be crossed. …

When a design team gathers for review or critique, less skilled designers approach critiques by defending their design (what I call the design result) instead of sharing their process. A more skilled design mode is to wonder — how did this design come to be? …

There is a myth that artists can do some magic that others can not. But what appears as magic is a gap in understanding; we don’t see how a thing happens, so it must be magic. The real trick is working day in day out to make progress, have a…

When I first saw color gradients on the computer, they were stark. Think of 1990’s PowerPoint font with a rainbow gradient fill. By default, color gradients on the computer change in evenly spaced percentages from one color to another, this generally looks horrible, so their usage died out. …

This morning, I watched the river move at a walking pace, sauntering within the channel that cuts through town. The river has been doing some version of this for over 100,000 years. Long before countries and kings and dictators. 80,000 years ago, the Deschutes River in Bend, Oregon, flowed around…

When you ask for advice, whether in life or design, you get two styles of input. One.) People share what they would do. They may phrase it as what you should do, but it’s advice as if they were taking action. If you want to be like the person, then their…