Articles

8 questions to ask a client before designing their website

You've beaten off the competition and are ready to start designing a shiny new website for your client. Awesome. But now what? Of course it's tempting to dive straight into...

A machine for dreaming

Sometimes when I wake in the morning, in that halfway state between sleep and being awake, I can see words scrolling in front of me as if a newspaper is...

10 things I’ve learned in 10 years working as a graphic designer

If I could write a letter to my 23-year-old self, the naive fresh-faced version of me who had just finished art school and was looking for his first job in...

If you want to be a writer, writing is not a choice

A late night ramble about writing. 

4 tips for finding work you love

If you’re a TED talk fan, the chances are fairly high that you’re already familiar with a presentation on “The power of introverts” by the American writer Susan Cain. If...

Frankensteining — when graphic design turns fugly

I don’t know how long it’s been this way, but it seems to be standard practice in the graphic design industry these days to present three design routes to clients. ...

Dear graphic design (an open letter to the profession which I thought had broken me)

You were the career which I chose blindfolded out of a hat when I was eighteen, before I even knew what a real job was or what a graphic designer...

I thought I was an alien

Seriously. Around the age of ten or so, I wasn't sure if I was human or not.  For some reason I had cooked up a theory that I was an...

I was really a failure… really, really, really, really a failure — an interview with James Murphy of DFA Records

Watch the video below first — it’s less than 10 minutes long — and then keep on reading for my thoughts on his thoughts…

WordPress theming: tips and tricks for designers

At some point in 2005, just as my interest in Flash was starting to wane, I caught scent of a fresh-faced blogging platform called Wordpress.   Not knowing any PHP at...